Philip Charles has announced the availability of the K7 series of Debian GNU/Hurd CDs. He says: "The main feature of the K7 set is its quality. I would say it is the best set to date. IMHO, this set could be used to promote GNU".
This version features XFree86-4.3 for the first time, resulting in greatly improved X11 support. It is also the first version featuring the hurd package itself built against a recent glibc (current Debian unstable). You can download the mini-ISO here, the other ISOs are here. In order to install Debian GNU/Hurd, read the installation instructions from the Debian website. The K7 Readme offers more general information about the release.
From: Philip Charles [email blocked]
To: debian-hurd mailing list [email blocked]
Subject: K7 images built and being uploaded.
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 23:17:31 +1200 (NZST)
The first four CD iso images are being uploaded to ftp.gnuab.org. The
upload will be complete in about three days. I have a 15 KB/sec
connection. The first image is 25-30% uploaded.
We are just into the eighth CD, but all the *hurd-i386.deb's are on the
first two CDs so only the first four CDs have been released.
Grub has been upgraded to grub_0.94. A (very) mini grub iso image is
included along with the usual floppy image.
The main feature of the K7 set is its quality. I would say it is the best
set to date. IMHO, this set could be used to promote GNU.
I have just completed a successful installation using the 4.4 GB DVD.
The DVD is too big for me to upload (44% of my data allocation, 80-90
hours to upload), so let us have some discussion about how it can be
distributed and used.
Phil.
--
Philip Charles; 39a Paterson Street, Abbotsford, Dunedin, New Zealand
+64 3 488 2818 Fax +64 3 488 2875 Mobile 025 267 9420
[email blocked] - preferred. [email blocked]
I sell GNU/Linux & GNU/Hurd CDs & DVDs. See http://www.copyleft.co.nz
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Is there a hurd live-CD that woks?
I want to try it.
you can find a recipe to buil
you can find a recipe to build one yourself on http://hurd.gnufans.org/bin/view/Hurd/LiveCD ;-)
Why bother?
Hurd is 'interesting' in some ways, but is it really any good? How does it perform compared to Linux? How secure is it? Anyone know?
I think the main problem is h
I think the main problem is how few people there are working on it. The last update on the website was over a year ago.
Anyone know if it still has the 1GB partition size limit?
Other than that, it does seem to have some nice features -- I particularly liked the plugin systems for the filesystem.
hrm
I think its up to 2gb now (read the install manual)
status of the 2 GB limit
Ognyan Kulev is working on a patch to make support for file systems bigger than 2 GB possible. It is not yet applied upstream, but people are running it with quite some success and it probably will be used in the Debian package in the near future.
Ognyan is also working on ext3 support as part of his master thesis and will release an experimental patch shortly.
You can find the patches here.
His latest announcement is here.
HURD security/reliability
I think HURD is as reliable as uh, it is experimental code. As for security, nobody knows enough about how it works to make an exploit, and there aren't more than a few machines on the Web anyways, so why bother? The performance is, uh, it's experimental.
HURD is more about OS design ideas at this point than dirty production work. If you want something that works and works and you don't have to mess too much, install Debian stable with security updates. If you want to experiment with message passing systems etcetera check out HURD.
HURD security/reliability
Sure, the Hurd is not suited for production systems right now, but it's a great hacker system. I was pondering using it as my main system (mutt, slrn, irssi, links all work) some time ago, but now my new notebook has a giganet ethernet NIC which is not supported by GNU Mach.
Not a lot of X11 applications have been built yet, but this will probably change soon once a Debian build daemon is running again. If you like to work on the console, the Hurd is quite usable already. It still crashes every now and then, but these days I rarely get severy file system corruption anymore and I need to constantly build stuff or do similar things to really provoke a freeze
The design of the Hurd is als
The design of the Hurd is also about security. For example the system of having 0 or multiple uids. If a daemon (for example ftpd) supports this, you don't need to run it as root. It starts without any uid and can add uids when a user logs in (using username and password).
In the Hurd users can do a lot of things without making the system less secure (that is the main idea behind the Hurd). Users can for example "mount" (remote) filesystems in their home directory, for example. This filesystem is a userspace process that runs with the UID of the user that "mounted" it.
The main problem here is that there are not that many Hurd developers. If there are bugs that make the Hurd crash or less secure, they are not fixed that quickly because of that.
So it would be great if more people would work on the Hurd and fix bugs instead of adding yet another neat feature. :)
x11/x*
So Hurd is microkernel, i guess, it will get along with x11/x* well.
x11/x*
Debian GNU/Hurd has the newest XFree version that is in debian. It worked fine for me.
I really hope someone will try to get Xorg to work on GNU/Hurd.
It's work with the same configuration of linux's XFree?
How hard is the installation with comparison to the regular virsion of Debian?
It's work with the same configuration of linux's XFree?
It is not hard at all. And it is described clearly in the installation guide.
The main differences are the keyboard and mouse. With older versions of Debian GNU/Hurd you had to set a special translator to make it possible for X to access the console hardware. With newer versions you need to start the Hurd console with specific arguments and start XFree from there. The Hurd console is still under development and not yet finished, therefore it is not started at startup yet. So the most important thing is that you need to configure XFree to use the right mouse translator and that you need to start the new Hurd console.
One thing that might bother some people is that there is no DRI/agpart support in GNU Mach. So when people really need that, the only alternative is using the VESA driver, I think.
DVD Distribution
If you want to mail me the DVD, I'll host a torrent on my end, I've got 6/6 to work with, its not the fastest around, but its pretty darn fast... email me at micker/at/gmail/dot/com if you wish... It'd be pretty cool to get a dvd image out there...
DVD Distribution
Philip said he wants to work on a DVD soon:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-hurd/2004/09/msg00035.html
It is said that it uses new g
It is said that it uses new glibc, does it support NPTL?
It is said that it uses new g
No, it does not. Work is currently underway to get TLS (thread local storage) working on the Hurd, which is one of the requirements for NPTL.
Porting NPTL is a middle-term goal though, as far as I know.
K?
by the way, what does the "K" stand for?
K?
It identifies the series, there were an H and I series before K. I think Philip changes the letter when he updates the installation or changes the CD structure in a major way. If he just takes a new snapshot of the available Debian packages, he merely increments the number.
In this comment, he hints that he might use the xattr-hurd method (i.e. untarring a Hurd file system with intact passive translators from GNU/Linux) for the L series.
the K is just part of their n
the K is just part of their numbering scheme .. looking in http://ftp.gnu.org/iso/ kinda explains it