Mercurial on University of Nottingham Computer Science Servers
March 1, 2010
For a while now, I’ve been using Subversion to keep track of personal projects and coursework at university. SVN is installed on the UNIX servers as Computer Science, so it’s a relatively trivial process to get up and running with a repository when I start a new assignment.
Recently though, I’ve been looking in to Mercurial as a more modern alternative. Some things about Subversion are really starting to annoy me, like the inability to ignore files on a repository-wide level easily (I work with Python all the time, so .pyc files can really get on my nerves!). Mercurial seems slicker, and I’m interested in the concept of DVCS, as opposed to the classic client-server way of thinking.
However, Mercurial is not installed on the (rather ancient, now) Solaris servers at university. I really admire the job that the sysadmins do, so I am in no way condemning them for it not being installed. Instead, I set out to get it compiled and working myself.
Installing it on the servers, it seemed, was the easy part. I followed the installation instructions (making sure to include the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable) and all was well.
Cloning from the server, however, wasn’t so easy. The problem lies in the fact that Mercurial is now installed for me, and me alone. The hg binary lives in my home directory, not on the server’s main path (i.e. the /usr/bin/ directory). Therefore, I needed to tell the client exactly what command to run on the server. If anyone else is having the same trouble, the command that I finally came up with looks like this:
hg –config ui.remotecmd=”LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/sfw/lib PYTHONPATH=~/lib/python ~/bin/hg”
I then aliased this command to hgtuck to save my sanity (the server is named tuck, after Friar Tuck in the Robin Hood legends), and I now have a perfectly working Mercurial install!
If anyone else is looking to do something similar, then I hope this little tip saves you some time!





Over the past week, I’ve been upgrading my e-mail system to Exchange 2007 (I was previously using Exchange ‘03). For me, it’s very useful to have the systems that I write about, and consult for, installed at home in a “semi-production” manner. It means that I have a system to work on, and I am concerned with keeping it up and running as smoothly as possible – which introduces me to intricacies that I would not otherwise encounter, if I were just running a little test lab.
Ever since my post about the
As a sort of follow-on from my last post, I thought I’d write a little about the latest little addition to my system – roaming Firefox profiles. This is something I had always considered to be almost impossible to achieve, without complicated logon and logoff scripts that syncronise the correct folder(s) to give the same effect as a ‘redirected’ profile. Well I discovered a much easier way to achieve actual *real* profile redirection, when browsing around the features offered by Group Policy Client Side Extensions.

Anyway, on with the good! The new GP Preferences allow an administrator to define, amongst others, drive maps for client machines, printer connections and power options. As you may be thinking, this just about does away with the need for logon scripts! Most, if not all of the common tasks that are performed with logon scripts can now be done from a group policy object.





