Well, after a few months of lurking on the various hurd mailling lists, I finally got up the gumption to actually install the Hurd. I hedged my bets, and managed to get it running in a VMware sandbox, which is likely where it will stay, until such time as I have a free machine (or get that 486 running again...)
I installed from the latest tarball on alpha.gnu.org, booted from floppy, successfully ran native-install, created a user account, became unnervingly frustrated with emacs, and discovered that nice things like vi and telnet didnt' seem to exist. I take it that these niceties have to be downloaded from the debian package ftp sites? is there a list that someone may have put together of what needs to be installed yet to actually do something usefull with a Hurd system? (I consider things like telnet, the berkeley r-commands, and vi or vim to be necessary. =) Also, I've seen it mentioned in passing here on the lists, but why, exactly, is /usr symlinked to the current directory? it seems like a patently bad idea to have "/usr -> ."; shouldnt' it be "/usr -> /"? And why not have a /usr, anyway? Perhaps it's just my years of having "normal" unix systems to grow up in, but I find this quite odd. Also, the concept of a "not-yet-logged-in" user shell is somewhat disconcerting to me; any user can cat /etc/passwd without even logging in! If these questions have already been answered elsewhere, please just point me in the right direction. Thanks! -- Gregory Ade <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Find PGP public key at http://www.pgp.com (Key ID 0x63B57600) #include <standard/disclaim.h> procmail(1) is your friend.
