Hello, here are my experiences with gnu-19991025.tar.gz.
1. Installation. It was a nice surprise to get a NFS-ready system without the need to install additional packages. I tried the installation on two different PCs. With one, the keyboard problem occured (shell sees only every second character) as you write in the installation script. Great: reboot unmounts the root filesystem cleanly, so fsck is no longer needed after a reboot. 2. Problems. The grub program which is part of gnu-19991025.tar.gz fails. Maybe it was linked with the wrong ncurses library? So does in.telnetd (not part of the tar file). There are still no working packages with these two programs on the debian ftp server. grub compiled from the sources works fine. /root/.profile calls mesg which is not in the tar file. This is not a big problem, but it might be fixed some day? OSTYPE=linux-gnu. I think somebody else already mentioned this. 3. Strange things. One of my PCs has 128 MB RAM and runs VMWARE with adjustable RAM for the virtual machine which runs The Hurd. Hurd boots with 32 MB RAM, but not with 48 MB or 64 MB. The boot failed sometimes with 92 MB. When it fails, the error message is "bootstrap/default-pager panic: openi 5000". The installations of make_*.deb and cpp_*.deb failed at first with this message: Setting up ...: /dev/fd/6: /dev/fd/6: Computer bought the farm dpkg: error processing make (--install): subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 126 A second try (without reboot!) was successful. After saving a file, the editor (called with "editor /etc/hosts") says "failed to write ...". I had this message with several files. In every case, all my changes were written! There are still problems in my installation (with ext2fs.static?) which occur when I work too long. To reduce them, I do software builds (gnumach, hurd, grub) on NFS mounted directories. Nevertheless several reboots are needed because make fails after some time with such messages: cpp: output pipe has been closed mig: fatal: noSubSystem declaration bash: pipe error: Protocol family not supported 4. Help needed. How can I get a (E)IDE CD-ROM device to set up the translator for the ISO filesystem? The source code says these devices should be /dev/wcd0, /dev/wcd1, ..., but /dev/MAKEDEV refuses to create such device names. Regards, Stefan Weil
