Hello! It's a pity, that
a) The official Hurd Site does not mention "The easy guide to installing Hurd on a Linux box.". I found it until the bottom of Neal Walfields official "The GNU/Hurd installation guide" (which by the way helped me bootstrap gladly my first Hurd) b) The Debian Web site does not even mention how to install The Hurd from within Debian, (http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/) while the respective install scripts are at the same place! corss-install, dpkg-hurd, native-install Matthew Vernon's description seems easily be able to be scripted, provided a Debian Installation and maybe a very simple debian package, which I want to propose right now: Name: hurd-installer. It would depend on grub, dpkg, sharutils, patch, e2fsprogs, etc. minus what is in the essential packages It would contain the scripts/files: /var/lib/hurd/cross-install /var/lib/hurd/native-install /var/lib/dpkg-hurd and in /usr/share/doc/hurd-installer Neal Walfields Document, Matthew's Document, et al. As in a running Debian System lot's of things to be known for the installation are already given, the installation could be preconfigured easily and a great deal of it could be done bye script, which could be either provided to be used manually, or canned into a postinstall recipe. I have practically no experience with debconf and/or dialog, so I feel a cannot reasonable do it in a nice way. However find at the bottom a description of how this script could behave. Although there are plans to integrate the Hurd installation into the debian-installer or elsewhere, this plans will maybe not realized in the near to middle future. This package could help spread the Hurd in the meanwhile, and at almost no cost. There would be at least to typical aplications for it: a) somebody wants to check out the Hurd for curiosity, and installs the Hurd along with his/her Debian installation. b) To install only the Hurd on a computer, one could install a minimal Debian installation on either: - the future swap partition - the future /tmp partition or - on a to be "rescue/Debian" partition As less as 150 MBytes should be required for the "install-partition". After the standard Debian installation just skip Tasksel and dselect, and run apt-get install hurd-installer. Now my notes on the script: * Find partitions ================= fdisk -l |grep ^/dev/ check for each partition whether it is mounted and whether it is mentioned in fstab. take into account also /proc/mdstat and /proc/raidtab is there a utility to find free space? this gives lists of available partitions, of probably mountable or trashable partitions, and of swap-partitions sort and show a list with: type, size, mountpoint, eventually (not needed) their Hurd partition name **let select 1) the root partition 2) swap partition/s 3) partitions which should be mounted aditionally For batch processing: be able to specify one --root <dev> and various --swap <dev> command line options * Format and prepare root partition =================================== The selected one mount it at /gnu create specified mount points mount eventually other partitions (/var, /tmp),but probably not /home * Cross Install the Hurd ======================== We can get the actual the used Debian mirror from /etc/apt/sources.list Than we offer: 1) install from the standard location 2) Specify a local mirror 3) Specify a directory where the packages can be found add alpha.gnu.org, if there is a "deb http://"; line in the selected source ** Configure Grub Is there a script to "convert" lilo.conf to menu.lst? The grub package provides a reasonable menu.lst for booting hurd in doc/examples so: create a menu.lst with at least Gnu/Hurd entry according to the root partition (single-user!) Let the user specify wether to boot from other partitions/operating systems too and add them. Let the user specify where to boot The Hurd from: - Floppy - Hurd root partition - Master Boot Record run grub-install acordingly Why can't we fumble with /libexec/rc so it runs native-install automatically this time? Can we make native-install create device files for all to-be mounted partitions, not only root ? Can we make the new Gnu reboot in single user mode and rerun native-install again? Can we have the network configuration automatically migrated from /etc/network/interfaces to The Hurd and activated in the first reboot? ** Restart the system ===================== Of course tell the user we want to do so. If we did not install Grub to the MBR tell user to insert and/or select the proper boot device. ------------------------------ Best regards, Jorge-Le�n
