Profile: workstation

Terminal and bench tooling for the machine the station runs on

Stage: post-1.0

Who it is for

Anyone whose station machine is also the bench machine and wants the serial consoles, version control and enumeration tools every device problem starts with.

At a glance

Stage	post-1.0
Units	7
Disk	about 200 MB
Hardware	None. A serial adapter is what the consoles are for.
Consent	none
Install	hammunition install workstation

What it installs

Version control, three serial consoles, a terminal multiplexer, and the two hardware enumeration tools every device problem starts with. Seven packages, all from the distribution's own archive on every supported target — nothing here adds a repository or asks for consent.

Disk footprint: Roughly 200 MB. An editor from the editors profile adds around 400 MB on top of this.

Why these belong together

A person building a station is usually also building the machine it runs on, and every RF profile in this catalog silently assumes some of this is already present. Manifests install from pinned git revisions, hardware entries instruct you to run lsusb, badge and Meshtastic work needs a serial console, and a decode running over SSH to a field machine needs to survive the link dropping. This is that assumed floor, made explicit and installable rather than left to chance.

Packages (7)

git, tio, minicom, screen, tmux, usbutils, pciutils

What it deliberately excludes

Shells, prompts, dotfiles, window managers, fonts, colour schemes, and terminal emulators beyond what serial work needs. The rule is simple enough to apply without argument: if it is a matter of taste, it is not in scope. There are a thousand dotfile projects and this is not one of them; every hour spent choosing between tmux and zellij is an hour not spent on the source backend, which is what actually blocks 60% of the parity target. Also excluded, since 2026-09-03, is any editor: codium and code live in the opt-in editors profile because each needs its publisher's apt repository on most targets, and that gate should never stand between an operator and lsusb.

Install it

Read the plan first. It changes nothing and prints every package, build, file and system change, and every consent gate you will meet:

hammunition show workstation
hammunition install workstation --dry-run

Then do it. The engine asks for your sudo password once, near the start, and shows the same plan again before it asks you to confirm:

hammunition install workstation

A member your machine cannot take is deferred by name and the rest installs (D-039); the plan lists each under Will NOT happen, with the reason and the command that fixes it. Installation explains how to read every part of the plan.

What you configure by hand afterward

Set user.name and user.email before your first commit or git refuses to make one. Serial work needs membership of the dialout group, which the hardware catalog requests but which does not apply to a session already open — log out and back in. Nothing here ships a tmux, screen or minicom configuration, deliberately: those are taste, and taste is excluded.

Your first ten minutes

1. Read the plan: hammunition install workstation --dry-run. All seven packages are from your distribution's own archive; nothing adds a repository.
2. Install: hammunition install workstation.
3. Set your git identity: git config --global user.name "Your Name" and git config --global user.email you@example.org.
4. Join the serial group: hammunition hardware apply, then log out and back in.
5. List what is attached: lsusb for USB devices and lspci for PCI ones.
6. Open a serial console: tio /dev/serial/by-id/<your-adapter>. tio remembers settings; minicom and screen are there if you prefer them.

Optional: serial-terminal (recommended: putty)

Rig debug ports, TNC configuration and GPS at raw baud all want a serial console. PuTTY is the familiar GUI one; picocom and tio are the terminal-native answers. If you already run one, it is respected. The engine detects an existing one (putty, cutecom, picocom, tio, minicom, screen, moserial) and respects it; only when none is found does an interactive install offer: putty, cutecom, picocom, tio, minicom. Never installed silently; --yes skips with a note.

Take it off again

hammunition uninstall workstation --dry-run
hammunition uninstall workstation

This removes what Hammunition itself installed and nothing else. It does not remove dependencies apt pulled in, group memberships or configuration files it wrote; the plan says so and the transaction log records them (D-004).