Experiences with the HURD
Hello!
I installed the HURD recently. The first time I tried it I forgot to
make hurd the owner of the ext2fs on my HURD-partition and so
native-install did not work.
I tried it some more times and my next discovery was that HURD seems
not to like swap-space on logical partitions. I made a logical
partiton with about 50 MB of swap-space for the HURD and when I tried
to multi-boot (I placed the swap-partition in /et/fstab before) the
HURD crashes while booting.
Next time I tried to install HURD with my linux-swap-partition (I also
run Debian2.1 on my PC). The partition is about 96 MB and HURD did not
have any problems using this partition until now. It is a primary
partition.
Next I configured the network and I had no problems with that. I have
a 3com 509 ISA-Card in my PC runnung HURD and a PCMCIA-Ethernetcard
(NE2000) in my notebook running Debian 2.1. It works well under Linux
on both computers. But with HURD I discovered some strange
behaviours. When I ping my linux-box from the HURD, all packets get
lost. When I ping the HURD-box from linux, all works fine. And when I
ping my linux-box AFTER I pinged the HURD-Box all works fine with the
HURD, too.
I set up an anonymous ftp-server on my linux-box and I can download
files with the HURD. Thats fine. I also set up telnet and telneting my
linux-box with the HURD also works fine. I setup telnetd on the HURD
and when I try to telnet HURD with my linux-box, strange things
happen. It's no problem to connect to the HURD, but it needs some
minutes before I get a message about the escape charackter. It needs
some other minutes before I get a password prompt. But when I type my
password, all works fine. What might be the problem? It's no
hardware-thing, it works perfectly with linux!
Is there any chance to get nfs working? What programms (packets) do I
need to get it working?
Another annoying thing is, that there is only one virtual
terminal. (Or are there other ones - Alt-Fx did not work for me). When
a programm crashes and messes up the screen, there is no possibility
to shutdown the system cleanly - good luck telnet works. I can
shutdown the machine with telnet).
How can I install the german keymap? I downloaded keymap.tar.gz from
Marcus but I do not know how to use it. And how can I make it
installed at boot-time. The US-keyboard-layout is annoying. (O.K.,
telnet is a solution;-))
I also want to try to get X working on my machine. What packets do I
need to install. It's crazy to do that with dpkg, I did not know what
dependencies a packet have, it's trial and error. Not quite
funny. There seem not to be special X-Servers for different cards,
only the XFree-common-packet, is taht right.
I tried to install the gcc (of course...). It has a dependency on
cpp. But this packet do not exist in devel. Where can I find it?
Another thing: Grub works fine from floppy, but there is no
/floppy/boot/grub/menu.lst which I can edit. Do I have to mount the
floppy first? How can I do that with the HURD? I would even more like
it to install GRUP to the MBR. How can I make that? It's not really
ehat I think a modern OS should do, booting from floppy...
So, that are my experiences with the HURD until now. I think, the
HURD's really cool, I like it. Maybe I can help you with something, I
would like that. But I am no programmer, just could program a little C
and Pascal.
Nice new year 1900,
Michael Thaler
michael.thaler@physik.tu-muenchen.de
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