The road to Manchester

September 6, 2010 · Posted in Gentoo, Linux, Travelling

Some of you might already know that I am moving to Manchester/UK this year ( at least ) to attend a MSc course at the University of Manchester. The Computer Science Department offers a variety of courses hance I am not sure which pathway I am gonna choose yet. The Computer System Engineering MSc looks rather good but I will have to wait for the 1st week of lectures before I make my choice. In any case, moving to UK is quite an experience, and I am really excited about that :)

Even though the motivation about Gentoo development is anything but high, I was quite worried about the fact that I couldn’t bring my two “dev” machines[1][2] with me so all I have is my laptop and my netbook, but lets face it, you can’t do much development on such hardware :-/. I could easily forward a dozen of ports on my router in order to remotely administer all my services but, when it comes to security, this is a serious drawback. This really left me with one choice: Openvpn :). Thanks to this guide, the whole setup was easier than I originally thought. Now, I am able to access my local network from anywhere. Furthermore, tmux[3] makes the whole /remote/development process much easier :). What a great app \o/

[1] Linux Phoenix 2.6.34-gentoo-r6-darth-vader

#1 PREEMPT Wed Aug 25 02:09:42 EEST 2010 x86_64

AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 2800+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

Just for stable amd64 keywording and Server services

[2] Linux Mystical 2.6.35-zen2-dark-jedi #1

ZEN SMP PREEMPT Thu Sep 2 21:19:07 EEST 2010 x86_64

AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1055T Processor AuthenticAMD GNU/Lin

This is actually a *good* dev machine. The 6-core power combined with 4GB@1066 RAM

is an ideal platform for extensive development and compilation 24/7

* dev-db/mysql-5.1.50-r1: Merge time 2 hours, 7 minutes, 45 seconds ( tests enabled )

* sys-devel/gcc-4.4.4-r1: Merge time 15 minutes, 36 seconds

* sys-libs/glibc-2.12.1-r1: Merge time 11 minutes, 5 seconds

This devbox hosts 6 chroors to test all the Qt4 live versions and one 1 gcc-4.5.X chroot

[3]

Tags: Gentoo, Manchester, MSc, OpenVPN, UK

Comments

11 Responses to “The road to Manchester”

Florian on September 6th, 2010 5:49 pm

Yes tmux is just perfect ! I understand your “what a great app”, I’m also in love with the power of this terminal multiplexer, and it has mouse support for scrollback/vim/less, and soon a new layout “monocle” to make a splitted pane full screen =) yay!
Alex Buell on September 6th, 2010 7:30 pm

How long does it take you to build OpenOffice?
Vasilis on September 6th, 2010 9:18 pm

First of all, good luck on your MSc course. This is going to be an excellent experience and, who knows, maybe you’ll find a descent job and consider living there. ;-)

Wow. My gcc merge time is 45′ (for the same version as yours).
Markos on September 7th, 2010 1:10 am

@Florian
Yeah I used to use screen but tmux is much better

@Alex
Sorry, I don’t build openoffice from source. I use the -bin package

@Vasilis
Thanks man. I will definitely look for a job over there. Greece is not the ideal place for IT professionals. Yeah I told you, X6 phenom is gooooood :)
Alex Buell on September 7th, 2010 1:49 am

I still think you should try to build it at least once, just to see how long it takes to build. It’s a good indicator of how powerful a box is. I’ve been thinking about building a X6 box and wanted to know if the 1055T is good enough to build it in less than a hour!
chithanh on September 7th, 2010 10:46 am

@Alex
I have a 3.1 GHz Quad-core Phenom II and it already builds OOo in one hour.
My gcc merge time is 28 min (with gcj enabled).
Markos on September 7th, 2010 2:00 pm

I did try to build openoffice but the compilation fails due to some Qt4 undefined references :)
Alex Buell on September 7th, 2010 3:22 pm

@Chithanh: How much RAM did you have installed?

@Markos: File a bug report on bugzilla or look for reports with similar problems for a resolution.
Markos on September 7th, 2010 8:54 pm

I guess this is because of Qt-4.7.0_rc1 but I have to look at it
Markos on September 12th, 2010 7:23 pm

@Florian

Is there a decent way to use the mouse to copy lines from tmux? I cant figure how to do that :-/
The road to Manchester : Yet another open source blog ;-) | my Manchester News on June 9th, 2011 8:47 am

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