Hello Ben! Sun, 12 Jan 2003 09:57:19 -0500, you wrote:
> Hello. > I'm new to the hurd. I'm impressed with how much I can do with it. > Here are a few things off the top of my head. I'm sure most of > them can probably be answered with an "RTFM!" and a URL. welcome :) > I'm confused about the debate about cross-installing. (I admit, I > just joined the list a couple of days ago, so I didn't catch the > beginning.) Less than a week ago, knowing almost nothing about > hurd, I found Neal's guide, followed it, and had no problem > cross-installing. (What's not supposed to work?) You used Marcus' tarball, which is a good choice, but that was not the subject of the discussion, the discussion was about cross-installing from scratch with dpkg-hurd and such, not using the tarball. > Is there a reliable implementation of /dev/random out there? And > if so, why wasn't it packaged with the hurd? (I confess that what > information I found online about it confused more than informed > me.) There is a random translator on http://kilobug.free.fr/hurd/random-64.tar.gz (just a port of Marcus' random translator to the new API). It works, but without a source of strong entropy (like the one that would be in GNU Mach 2.0 aka OSKit Mach one day), it is not usable for "secure" operations (like generating a private key, ...). So, yes, it gives out uniform random data, but not cryptographically-safe ones. > I've downloaded a few 3rd-party sources and during compilation, I > notice that the C source files don't match the header files in > /include/hurd. (One or two formal arguments don't match in a > handful of functions.) What causes this discrepancy? Is this an > ongoing problem? (Put another way, do the hurd header files keep > changing? If I ever take a crack at developing any system stuff, I > would want to be aware.) There was an API change a couple of month ago to support large files and 64-bits platforms. > Is there a way to create and to access virtual terminals at boot > time? I miss pressing Ctrl+Alt+F2 like with linux, and I'm tired > of having to hit the reset button when my shell hangs (since I > can't enter another shell to kill the offending process). The only > "workaround" I have found is to enter X (which doesn't quite cut > it). There is Marcus' console server and client, look in the mailing list archive for instructions on how to set it up. You can use screen too. > I'm looking forward to using hurd and exploring the possibilities > of an open-source microkernel system. I'll appreciate any help I > get. No problem ;) (and please, we do Free Software, as in Freedom, not opensource ;p) -- Gael Le Mignot "Kilobug" - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://kilobug.free.fr GSM : 06.71.47.18.22 (in France) ICQ UIN : 7299959 Fingerprint : 1F2C 9804 7505 79DF 95E6 7323 B66B F67B 7103 C5DA Member of HurdFr: http://hurdfr.org - The GNU Hurd: http://hurd.gnu.org
