Debian GNU/Hurd Base Set "gnu-19990104" available now!
[note that this mail is cross-posted. Consider cutting the list of
recipients as appropriate]
Hello,
I have finished the Debian GNU/Hurd base packages and want to share them with you!
The installation is quite simple. Make sure you have a GRUB boot disk
first[1]. Then, create your hurd partition with "mke2fs -o hurd /dev/???",
where ??? is the device file of your partition. The base packages take 30MB,
so you want a bit more :)
After mounting the partition, for example at /gnu, you have two options:
a) I did upload a tar file (9.5 MB) named
alpha.gnu.org/pub/gnu/hurd/contrib/marcus/gnu-19990104.tar.gz
md5sum: 8db6c7ccc4b1b8674014b82de9dd0e52 9536753 gnu-19990104.tar.gz
Then you just need to fetch it and do
cd /gnu; tar -xpzvf path/to/gnu-19990104.tar.gz
Boot your Hurd partition with the GRUB disk. Done.
b) Collect the necessary packages[2] and put them in a single directory,
together with the "cross-install", "native-install" and "dpkg-hurd"
scripts from alpha.gnu.org/pub/gnu/hurd/contrib/marcus.
Then run
./cross-install /gnu
After the script has finished, you can boot the Hurd and run
./native-install
Done. Reboot (not necessary, but still), and enjoy.
For everybody who has still gnu-0.2 and don't want to risk a new install,
you can TRY to fetch the dpkg tar file from my contrib directory on
alpha.gnu.org (see above). Maybe you need the new libc, too. This way you
can gradually move to a Debian system, but you are on your own here, sorry.
For the people who are not common with dpkg, here are some
commands for a quick start:
dpkg -i file.deb # install file.deb
dpkg -i --force-architecture file.deb # install even if architecture is wrong
dpkg -r file.deb # remove file.deb
dpkg --purge file.deb # (remove file.deb and) configuration files
dpkg -s file # status of package file?
dpkg --print-avail file # what version of package file is available?
dpkg -l [pattern] # list all known packages (matching
# pattern) and their status
dpkg -L file # Which files does package file contain?
dpkg -S some/file # Which packages do contain some/file?
You can also try "dselect", although it's not great. We are working on a
replacement for it.
Known problems:
* because we don't have file locking, password activities are not working
(because <shadow.h> lckpwd does not work). We can change the sources and
remove the locking, but locking is used so often, it would be useful to
implement it (hint, hint :) Note that I already removed the locking from
dpkg and install-info, so running two dpkg's parallel is asking for trouble!
* Perl needs to be packaged proper.
* You need always "--force-architecture" under the Hurd. Explanation:
dpkg THINKS the hurd is a "i386" system, which is true, but i386 in Debian
mean i386-linux-gnu, and not i386-gnu. I can hack around this in dpkg and
upload a new version. Not today, though (it's late). It's not a big
problem anyway.
* I will leave it to you to add some further configuration. Here some tips:
eval $(lesspipe) allows it to look at Debian packages with "less *.deb"
(and many other things, for example compressed files)
Setup TERM=mach all over the place.
Edit boot/servers.boot to use a pager device.
Please let me know if you have any problems with the packages or the
installation script.
Links:
http://www.debian.org/ Main web page of Debian
http://www.gnu.org/ Main web page of GNU
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html
http://master.debian.org/~brinkmd/hurd/
Archives:
ftp://ftp.debian.org Debian ftp archive, see [2]
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/pub/gnu/hurd/ Main GNU Hurd archive,
/contrib/marcus my directory there.
Thank you,
Marcus
[1] somewhere on alpha.gnu.org/pub/gnu/hurd
[2] a list of good packages is at the top of "cross-install".
Note that the latest bash (which you NEED), is not installed in the
Debian ftp archive yet. (slang, too)
Hurd packages are installed below
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/main/binary-hurd-i386/
--
"Rhubarb is no Egyptian god." Debian GNU/Linux finger brinkmd@
Marcus Brinkmann http://www.debian.org master.debian.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de for public PGP Key
http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Marcus.Brinkmann/ PGP Key ID 36E7CD09
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