How to install Oh My Zsh on Ubuntu

Douglas Silvio Corrêa
Development Enviroment Setup
1 min readDec 17, 2014

Yesterday I reinstall Ubuntu in a second partition of my Dell laptop and started to build my Development enviroment again.

One of the first things I used to do in my Mac when I formated it was installing the amazing framework Oh My Zsh by robbyrussel.

The problem with Ubuntu installation is that the proposed “automatic installer” not work “out of the box” as worked in Mac OS X.

If you run this:

curl -L http://install.ohmyz.sh | sh

You will get this:

Password: chsh: PAM: Authentication failure

So, after some minutes searching, I found that you need to check if zsh is in your /etc/shells. And also check if the zsh you are using (installed by apt-get) is on that path. To check it just check with:

which zsh

After you put it on /etc/shells, just delete ~/.oh-my-zsh folder and run again the installation command.

And don’t forget to logout and login again to see start with zsh. (On Mac OS you only need to close and reopen terminal)

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Douglas Silvio Corrêa
Development Enviroment Setup

migrated from enterprise software to web dev and now learning about systems programming, mostly with @rustlang. Husband of a queen, father of 2 princesses