Marcus Brinkmann wrote: > > What's up?
sorry about that mail ... i was trying to figure out how to subscribe to the hurd lists (debian, help and bug) so i tried to wake up the majordomo (or whatever) help agent. anyways, i'm on the lists now :-) here goes something of more interest, i hope. i installed the hurd a few days ago and am a complete newcomer to it. so here are a few impressions i've got from it so far: * i installed from a freebsd 3.2 stable from the gnu-*.tgz. it was quite easy, but for the fact that i didn't find the easy guide soon enough, so i kept wondering what the device naming was that i needed to give to serverboot. the link to the easy guide is broken in many pages, because the original site doesn't seem to respond. do you think you could fix it in your debian page? it used to be mirrored on the gnu pages here, where it's still kept: http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/software/hurd/easy.html * i've got 64 megs of ram, and since i don't use X (don't know how to get it to work anyways) i thought that would be enough, so i didn't bother with swap space, and i kept running into "(default pager): dropping data_request because of previous paging errors". could you add something explaining that this message means "ADD SOME MEMORY, YOU STUPID HUMAN" to some faq or doc ? * once i'd figured out what the cause was, i tried to make the hurd swap on my freebsd swap partition. it worked, but rebooting into freebsd showed me that the hurd had swaped ON my disklabel, so i spent the rest of my night trying to recall what the sizes of the partitions were. quite fun indeed :-). i've got 2 questions about this point: does anyone have a clue to what might have happened? and since i don't want to rewrite my disklabel on every reboot, and considering the fact that i don't have any partitions left, is there a way to make hurd swap to a file? (i don't fully understand translators, so there might be an easy way to achieve this that i missed) * sometimes (say, when i try ftpfs or ls -l into /dev) i get an error that beats me: something like a "Gratuitous error" or something. i don't have the exact message in mind, i'll try to grab it if there's interest. what troubles me is that i can't find the word "Gratuitous" that was printf'ed or something in any file inside gnumach-1.1.92-5/ or hurd-19990616/, so i wonder which entity is returning that to me. is it ls or cd, or something else ? i'm a freebsder, not used to the debian way yet, so i don't know where to fetch the sources for these programs. any pointers ? * similarly, i once had the message "rm: cannot unlink `somefile`: Computer bought the farm". actually quite funny, but i didn't get the meaning yet. i suspect it's rm who's sending that back to me, but since i don't know where to fetch the rm sources ... * i sometimes get something like an error (sorry for the vagueness) about not having fd/4 or the such. i recall having seen this on some doc, but can't recall where. could you please point me to the right place to look ? * the behaviour of unsu is quite odd, try this: su root, then unsu, and unsu again. then look at what user you are. is that a normal hurd behaviour? i thought i'd report that because under normal unix systems, such a behaviour would sound quite strange (or bogus ?). * one last thing i wanted to report is that the netcat package seems to build and work right, following the dpkg-source -x thing.dsc and dpkg-buildpackage -B procedure i saw in one of the lists archive. as i said, i'm not used to the debian way, so i might have missed some errors, don't take my word for the thing being right :-) well, that's all for now, sorry for the long post, and thanks for your patience. have fun, -- Andres.
