GNU/Hurd at LinuxTag 2003 in Karlsruhe =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
We had a machine running Debian GNU/Hurd at the FSF Europe booth (where one could meet me most of the time) and another one at the Debian booth. There have been surprisingly many people asking about the Hurd. Usually I was giving a short demonstration of the new console, adding and removing user-ids to tell what that is good for, showing the process list to explain a few of the servers (especially file systems and the password server) and telling them about file change notifications, often also mentioning ftpfs and the `run' translator. The system crashed a few times during my demonstrations (it was not a very recent GNU/Hurd system), but usually all went fine and people were quite impressed. People asked many questions, but the typical ones were ``How well does it work?'', ``What about driver support?'', ``What about other hardware architectures?'', ``What about L4?'' and ``Does X11 work?''; of course I answered the latter question just by smiling and entering `startx'. On sunday afternoon, I was giving a presentation about the Hurd, which was scheduled to take one hour, of which I used only 35 minutes (plus a few for answering questions from people coming to me after the talk), This time, I decided to not go much into the details, but explaining what makes the Hurd cool and how it differs from POSIX-only systems, not forgetting to mention that the biggest advantage of GNU/Hurd is that it combines high compatiblity with a lot of additional flexibility. For obvious reasons I tried to focus on saying what we already have achieved, rather than what we might do in the future. Three people told me that the talk was great (and one said it was ``exciting''), and I hope there is some truth in that. ;-) However, since the talk was not in the official program, but merely in the (somewhat hidden) ``free workshop'' track, less than twenty people have been there. We almost managed to have me give the presentation on a GNU/Hurd system itself, but unfortunatly we had a problem with the fonts in X11, and we failed to get it working before the talk, so I had to use GNU/Linux. Two minor t-shirt-related points: 1. During the presentation, I was wearing a nice OpenBSD t-shirt, and I made clear that the goal of GNU/Hurd is not to replace GNU/Linux or other free operating systems; instead, all free systems should aim at replacing proprietary systems together. 2. Like last year, we sold Hurd t-shirts at the FSF Europe booth, which again sold well; Hans Reiser (developer of ReiserFS) also bought one (well, actually two) and I had the opportunity to speak with him a bit about our projects - It seems he likes the Hurd, but I guess it is now important for him to finish ReiserFS version 4, so don't even ask when ReiserFS will be ported to the Hurd. In conclusion, the LinuxTag was certainly a success for us. Many thanks to Volker Dormeyer for providing a GNU/Hurd machine and for helping in explaining the Hurd to visitors; just as many thanks to Michael Banck for supporting me with various aspects of the talk and also for bringing a GNU/Hurd machine. Cheers, GNU/Wolfgang PS: You can find the slides of my talk (only in german, sorry) at <http://www.8ung.at/shell/lt2003-hurd.tgz> -- "A good programming language should have features that make the kind of people who use the phrase `software engineering' shake their heads disapprovingly." -- Paul Graham _______________________________________________ Help-hurd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-hurd
