Newbie questions

[Miah Gregory <mace@darksilence.net>]

Hi,

I've only recently subscribed to this list, so apologies if I've missed a
link.

I want to install the hurd on an old pentium machine I have, and so I had
a look around at the various hurd resource pages I could find. One of
those mentioned boot floppies, referring me to a thread on one of the
mailing lists. Having followed that thread, it didn't turn up any
definitive answer, just that boot floppies would be a good idea, but noone
had created any yet.

Has this situation changed since then? I found a boot disk image, but the
readme in the ftp directory indicated that there was currently no root
disk image available.

Also, what's the minimum hardware spec for running the hurd? Although
there's various hardware information pages, there doesn't seem to be a
minimum specification anywhere; my machine currently has 8Mb of RAM, and a
200/300Mb HDD. In theory, debian should be able to install onto this,
however in practice the severely limited memory causes the installer to
barf all over the place (even before the initial boot disk gets the
installer running).

Sorry for all the questions; I'm sure they've all been answered
before! :-)

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Miah Gregory