Hi, > Last night (and it was a looooooong night), I took an old IDE disk and I > installed Debian GNU/Hurd for the first time, using the great instructions > at http://www.memo.cx/gnuhurdguide/ . Install went smooth (of course, it's > as simple as extracting a .tar.gz file, uhmm.. It IS extracting a .tar.gz > file :)).
A quick look at that showed that it has not been updated since Feb 2000: quite outdated. > Since I had already been using GRUB for a long time, I only needed > to make some changes to my menu.lst to boot. I tried to, but no go. It > wouldn't recognize my partition at boot time. Then, I copied the boot files > (gnumach.gz and serverboot.gz) to my SCSI disk, and booted from there. Now, > everything was fine :). No problems completing the install with > ./native-install. I have no clue what is wrong with your set up. This is the first time that this has been reported and you have given no error messages. > Next thing I did was installing apt so I could dist-upgrade to the latest > packages. But, for some reason there's a very very very very very (did i say > very?) old apt in ftp.debian.org , which is unusable (it only supports i386, > not hurd-i386). Somebody (thanks to that person) at > #hurd/irc.openprojects.net mentioned ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/hurd/debian , > and I had a look. What I found there was a quite recent version of apt, that > supported hurd-i386. I installed apt, added > ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/hurd/debian to my sources.list and dist-upgraded. Again, if you had read a recent install guide you would have known this. > After I worked out some dependency problems and edited /etc/nsswitch.conf > (to remove the db entries), I had a fully functional GNU/Hurd system. What did you have to do. > Okay, time for some questions: > > - Where can I find the latest XFree4 Debian/HURD packages (Lots of places > are reporting they exist, but I can't find them)? Again, a latest install guide should do it or, try: http://debian.fmi.uni-sofia.bg/~ogi/hurd/ What places are reporting this and not pointing at an install guide or the mailing list? > - I'd like to join development. I'm a young professional programmer with > knowledge of (and experience with) basic, pascal, php, sql, c and c++. How > do I join development? The first thing I'd like to do is recompile some > packages for the Hurd, so I can use all programs with Debian/Hurd as I use > with Debian/Linux. However, I'm not a Debian developer (yet). Where do I > start? :) There is nothing to join. Write some code and submit it. Report bugs. Compile packages for which we do not yet have binaries. etc. > - When will that 'no partition sizes bigger than 1gb'-bug be fixed? Once .3 is released, that code will begin to be widely tested, i.e. those writing code have other priorities at the moment. > - Can I somehow enable SMP? (I'm running SMP here, so I'd like to use it). It is not yet supported. If you are interested in working on it, take a look at oskit-mach. > - Why is Debian/Hurd so slow in comparison to Debian/Linux. Installing the > libc0.2 package took about one hour. (Okay, Hurd is using an IDE disk and > Linux a SCSI disk, but it shouldn't matter *that* much) There is a lot of work to be done: Linux has hundreds of programmers working on getting the most performance out of the system. Before the hurd is optimized, the feature set needs to be (relatively) complete. > - When trying to install debconf it exits with an error 10. How do I find > out where and how it crashes? Without debconf, it is impossible to install > lynx, which is quite important if you don't have X and want to view some > webpages. I am not sure about this. Try being more verbose in your bug reports. -Neal -- Neal H Walfield University of Massachusetts at Lowell [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
