Dear * .*, I just tried out the Hurd-F2 CDs and would like to give some feedback. I hope that this is the appropriate place.
First, there has been some discussion here on the list concerning exim. Indeed, exim did not install at first. Apt-get complained that it could not find libpcre2. However, after I compiled and installed libpcre2 from my potato source CDs, exim installed without further errors. So I guess, this library should be included in future Hurd CDs. Second, I wonder, why rxvt is missing on the CDs. I grabbed the sources from the unstable tree. As far as I can see, they compiled and installed normally on my machine. Third, I couldn't find a way to run any terminal emulator as non-root. I have learned that for security reasons SUID and SGID programs ignore LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and therefore are unable to locate the X11 libs. xterm is SUID and rxvt is SGID. So, if I got it right, both won't run as non-root. Late last year I installed Debian GNU/HURD and X11 from the CDs distributed with the German magazine freeX. For some reason, then both xterm and rxvt *did* work as non-root. Now, they don't. So something must have changed since. Am I missing something important, or is there really no way for non-root users to run a terminal emulator under GNU/HURD? Third, there were some dependency probs with Xfonts packages and xutils: xfonts-base, xfonts-75dpi, xfonts-100dpi and xfonts-scalable require xutils >= 4.0.3, but the version on the CD is 4.0.3 After compiling the xutils source package from Debian's ftp server, the fonts packages did install normally. Finally, concerning the mouse under X I tried to follow the instructions from Marcus' freeX article (settrans -c /dev/mouse /hurd/mouse -protocol=microsoft -device=com0). In XF86Config I set protocol to "osmouse" and device to "com0". However, X would crash informing me about a failure to initialize a core device. With the conventional settings (device=com0, protocol=microsoft), X starts up normally, although mouse movements are somewhat retarded. Hope, these remarks are not completely useless. Regards, Johannes
