I now have three Ubuntu VM’s (virtual machines) on my Win7 PC running under VirtualBox.

Machine One is the ‘Firefox Build Environment’ that uses Ubuntu 16 and comes with Sublime-Text preinstalled with a host of macros to get the latest Firefox source and build the program. It works and was really fun to use. It’s also a bit boring as it’s kind-of single purpose for me. I really don’t want to mess with it as all this “stuff” is pre-configured and works.

So I obtained Ubuntu 16.04 and installed it as Machine Two. After installing it, I wrote a document about what I did. I then decided to try something radical (for me): I obtained Tomcat from source and compiled it. This required getting packages (apt-get) for Subversion, Java and other tools and libraries that Tomcat required. I was then able to get the source using SVN (subversion) and compile it following the Tomcat build documents. In the end it turned out to be very easy and fun, plus now I have Tomcat 9 (latest) running perfectly on Machine Two.

Now for the tough one. I started looking for an Open Source Reservoir Simulator, and found FLOW, from the OPM (Open Porous Media Project found at http://opm-project.org/. It was exactly what I was looking for: both Open Source and something I might be able to really get into again.

Although binaries are available, I really wanted to install from source, just for the fun of doing it all. After much reading, I obtained and installed Ubuntu 14.04 for Machine Three. This was the last version where OPM said everything compiled without problems.

After even more reading, I was able to obtain the sources and create shell scripts to download, configure and compile FLOW from source. I was also able to run the SPE test cases from my early days in industry successfully. Again, it was rather fun.

I also have other machines now – Fedora, OpenBSD, Debian and SAS, but the OPM machine is my favorite right now. I’ll write more on FLOW in another post.