Dicke Bertha online.

Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.

— Janis Joplin, Mercedes-Benz

So one cycle is over, UDS is done, blueprints are mangled — so far nothing different for me from anyone else working on Ubuntu around this time. Ah, but then there is one more thing that is special for a LibreOffice maintainer: new hardware. Shortly before UDS I consider updating my hardware for the next cycle. This time, I did — here is my new baby:

Although I name my machines usually after the element of having the same proton number as the last part of the local IP, this time it was different: She already had a name, before I even could make up my mind about IPs: Bastian and Claus from picom, who went though some extra trouble to build this beast, affectionately and unofficially called her “Big Bertha” — presumably a historical reference. Given that this “desktop” with 32 cores and 32GB RAM builds LibreOffice in 18 minutes flat (or 3 minutes 20 seconds with a warm ccache), I could not help but to keep that name.

In total this gives me this as workhorses:

• left: Thinkpad W520 — i7-27020QM with 16GB RAM (once called ‘mobile buildserver’ by my colleagues at Canonical)
• center: Sun X7197A screen and a Unicomp Customizer keyboard for Big Bertha
• also center: Nexus 7 (running Ubuntu), Galaxy SII (running Android), trusty old Casio CFX-9850GB plus
• right: Ideapad S12

The Casio is clearly the weakest computer of those, but still is more powerful than the first one I ever owned. And finally, next to the table:

• Big Bertha
• below the printer: my old IBM x3800 that I would fire up for emergency extra compile power or when it was getting too cold in the room (now decommissioned by Big Bertha, and on sale at ebay)
• behind the printer: old Asus Z53 running fileserver duties
• in front of the printer: original IBM Model M, for backup if the Unicomp should fail me
• the trusty old Sun Ultra 24, now replaced by Big Bertha (so decommissioned, and already sold)

Not in picture: A few routers and two Pandaboards. I guess I used up all my showboating credits for a few years now and promise to keep silent for a while on this.