A dselect initial run was almost perfect. No crashes, no dependency problems and a functional system. The current tarball was used and there is a satisfactory work-a-round.
An extra step in the installation is suggested, upgrading perl from 5.005 to 5.6. There is a small script in the root directory of the CD to do this. This should be run after the devices have been created, and swap and the cdrom mounted. Perl upgrades can cause massive problems as more and more packages start to depend on the later version, so perl needs to be upgraded asap in installation process. There is one problem with the first CD which involves hurd, login and other packages in a dependency/conflict mess. Fortunately dselect does not notice this initially, but on the second run it tries to sort this out and ends up marking about 60% of the packages for removal. There could be some dependency problems with packages from alpha.gnu as these have not been checked. The second CD has what is left over from the first plus some useless material from pool. A brave attempt is being made to eliminate the binary-all packages from pool which do not belong to the HURD, but this has to be done manually and a lot slips through. This CD will have material which people may want, but it is a mess. It boots from the compact kernel image. People can use apt to get what they want. Are there any partitioning tools for the HURD? I have not found any. The test system now has 1.5 GIG in three partitions. They were created during the initial boot phase of the installation. The object is to copy the CDs onto two of them, but HDD access is slooooow. At this stage no upgrade of the boot-floppies from 2.2.17 to a later version is contemplated. The documentation need to be revised and some cosmetic polishing done. I plan to have the CDs released by the end of the week. Has anyone any suggestions or comments? Phil. - Philip Charles; 39a Paterson St., Dunedin, New Zealand; +64 3 4882818 Mobile 025 267 9420. I sell GNU/Linux CDs. See http://www.copyleft.co.nz
