I finally could see a debian hurd with network connectivity, and then I tried X. It worked more or less (can't copy/paste through double button mouse).
As it sort of worked then I tried fluxbox (my wm of preference), and it worked. Then I went ahead and installed wdm. This combination sort of worked out. If I kill wdm and therefore X and any session then I can reboot without problem. When I reboot from X, with X and wdm alive still, then somehow the root partition grub uses gets screwed, an upon reboot a check of the partition is required. This can be reproduced all times. Problem doesn't end up there. Upon partition fix, it looks like wdm is pushed before the console is pushed, and then we get into trouble because the mouse and keyboard repeaters are issued only upon console startup. And then the X freezes. As I haven't found a way to get out of X (used to be ctrl-alt-backspace on linux, but on hurd I have no idea), I have no other option than a hardware reboot, which will keep me in the loop until I reboot on linux and correct screwed partition. Then when rebooting with hurd the console shows up and only after that wdm and everything is OK... A work around I've found is to kill wdm from X, so that X gets killed and then reboot (I say reboot because my machine is unable to halt, it always gets stuck on halt and again the partition always gets screwed, so no halt/shutdown at all) to perform a hardware shutdown on bios startup. This brings me to several points (sorry for the long description): 1.- Why not having the console startup only after all checks are done? I mean using a init.d script with some debian policy instead of using directly libexec/runsystem? This would allow console push later than all required checks and possible fixes. 2.- Why not delaying through debian policy wdm even more, to make sure it's guaranteed to show up after console has shown up? If we do 1, of course we have to guarantee wdm comes later than console. 3.- I think if we acomplish 2 then we're done with this 3 because the debian policy is kind of push/pop, but here it goes. When going down the pipe on halt/shutdown/reboot we must guarantee X/wm/wdm and all X related processes are killed previous to anything else to avoid problems, then the console can safely be killed and then all other things not console dependant... Of course something can be done so that rebooting from X is not that painful, but a debian policy work around sounds easier right? Thx, -- Javier-Elias Vasquez-Vivas
