Another OS not Linux not Unix - but Hurd!

[viking60]

I came over this OS where the development started before Linux to find an completely open source alternative to UNIX. It is called Hurd and by now it is ready for some use.

So I thought I should give it a go ! There are two major distros that are ready for Hurd Debian and Arch - guess which one I am going for

Sit tight - this is going to be exiting....

[viking60]

I Downloaded the Archhurd liveCD and but it in my VB and fired it up.
That toke quite a long time due to

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ppa: Probing port 0278

Lots of probing and it takes some time but finally we arrive at the login prompt and there the instruction is to enter 'login USER' so since I have not created any user I entered

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login root

And voila I was in
Now it is time to make some partitions in the Archhurd documentation there is talk of translators etc and this example

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cd /dev
MAKEDEV hd0 hd0s1 hd0s2 hd1

As we can se the disk management is "Grub style" and "Monky see so Monky do" and I was readdy to setup my arch.

Doing the traditional /arch/setup like it is documented right there in the terminal and find myself on familiar ground

Sit tight.....

[rolf]

A more recent Live CD can be found at http://teythoon.cryptobitch.de/hurd/liv ... 101.iso.xz.

It can be run with qemu via

$ wget http://teythoon.cryptobitch.de/hurd/liv ... 101.iso.xz
$ xz -d hurd-live-install-1273300101.iso.xz
$ qemu -m 512 -cdrom hurd-live-install-1273300101.iso

I thought it would be interesting to see if I could burn an iso to a disk, see how it booted on my hardware. I might try that, later, but these instructions involve using the qemu emulator, which I installed, then did as told. Here are a couple of screenies:

Looks like fun but it went straight to installation, no "woof" like in Puppy. So, after that it got a little scary when I tried to find an empty spot on my disks and I rebooted. The rescue session did not give me a prompt. I logged in as root but still no prompt. A little more sweat equity is required, evidently.

[viking60]

Wow! you have come further than me. I am still struggling with the makedev part. Arch will not accept my Monkey see monkey do partitioning, so I am about to use my head now....
This thing freezes up on me after I have logged in from time to time so it is going to take a while.....
Well what I found out so far is that I have made my MAKEDEV hd0 hd0s1
And Arch finds it and wants to prepare that hd. and then I get

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FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 1: Partition ends in the final partial cylind
Press any key to exit cfdisk

....
But It wanted me to reboot so I did and altered the grub line to hd0 (My virtual disk) from h2 (Cd) and botted right in so maybe I am good after all....
And then it froze again...
I am simply not able to install Arch on this Hurd thing so I will try a different approach....

[viking60]

Ok I got a live Hurd system now:

Having trouble with setting repos and no Norwegian keyboard so far.
I used a live CD from here
http://calimeroteknik.free.fr/ctkarchli ... on/en.html
Installing the stuff to my HD now - It can by done from the menu when right-clicking the desktop......

Rebooting and removing the live media......
I must admit I am somewhat impressed...
Looks like the freezing is a Hurd problem
http://bbs.archhurd.org/viewtopic.php?id=68
But it is not freezing in the Debian version so I will give that a go now...