Re: [frogs] ready to (re)start

["Trevor Daniels" <t.daniels@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Graham Percival wrote Thursday, January 28, 2010 1:47 AM


> Are you sure you don't want to try lilybuntu?  Download it,
> install and download the virtualization client, and boom, you're
> done.  (or so I hear from our developers on windows; I haven't
> tried it yet)

Well, it wasn't -quite- as easy as that, but it
did seem easier than the problems Kieren's experiencing.
At least all the dependencies were satisfied out of the
box, so make, make doc and make test-baseline just
worked (at least on a cleaned git).

There is some learning to be done, not so much with
ubuntu, more with VirtualBox.  To work smoothly you 
need to add Guest Additions, and the process for doing
this and then getting it to work is still rather
mysterious to me.  By poking it in various places it
eventually does the right thing, but I haven't worked
out a clear recipe.

The second big problem was the recommended virtual
disk size is too small to hold the full git with all
compiled docs and regtests.  I was faced with having
to run make check or make doc from a clean directory
every time I needed to switch from one to the other.
This took five hours plus and killed any momentum.
And there is no easy way to increase the disk size.
Eventually I made a new VM with a larger disk (10GB
is enough), and reinstalled everything.

There are other niggles, but these are not so important.
I still haven't managed to share disks across the two
systems, but find I don't really need to.  My 2Gb
RAM was a little too small, but I upped it to 3Gb and
now its fine.  

All this is under Windows Vista.  I've no idea what
the situation would be on a Mac.

Trevor



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