I have attempted to get this OSKit-Mach development system working for a while now, and all of my home-made kernels either get "User Trap 2" or else just reboot themselves.
However, I was able to boot Marcus's old 1999 test kernel and it booted up until it didn't find an ide drive. Thus, I suspect I something must be messed up with my Debian "cheap" cross compiler.
I would like to follow Jeff Bailey's instructions which are at http://hurddocs.sourceforge.net/howto/cross.html except I fear that they may be somewhat out of date.
Anyways, I have a slightly dated HP Vectra Pentium 100 on the way for use as my serial debugging machine. Heh, $9.00 on Ebay, and I have an AcerView33D here that I snagged from a Salvation Army Thrift Shop for $7.00.
I ran into a major mess installing (hides head in shame) windoze nt on my box this week. The lesson I learned: GRUB is King! It will save your butt. I got the stupid NT finally installed, so now I have Debian/Linux, Hurd, FreeDOS (which is pretty cool), and NT (which is a pain). Never ever ever use LILO again... never again...
A good idea for any hard drive would be to make like a 10MB hidden FAT partition as partition 1, install grub and its files on that partition along with FreeDOS. That way you can always boot to FreeDOS, edit your menu.lst, and run FreeDOS FDISK & etc. I found that running LILO is somewhat iffy and can easily leave your computer in an unbootable state. An alternative would be to put a mini Linux partition instead of FreeDOS, but 10MB is quite a bit for DOS, but pretty cramped for Linux.
This also has the advantage that if you pull out drives and stuff, and each drive has GRUB in its MBR, then you can use the GRUB command line to adjust for the drive number changes. LILO is very fragile and seems to give me "LIL-" a lot more than I like.
Also you don't need to run LILO after a kernel rebuild because it just doesn't care. It seems to me that the less you write to the MBR the better off you are.
Previously I had GRUB on /dev/sdb6 and LILO as the main bootloader (the hacked SuSE one with the cute Penguins running around). I would just use LILO to boot GRUB which then could load Hurd. I have since learned the errors of my ways :-)
Man did I get off-topic.
Live and learn.
