Installation report

[Dr A V Le Blanc <LeBlanc@mcc.ac.uk>]

I recently tried installing the Hurd, following the instructions
in http://people.ne.meiaone.net/jtobey/inst.html as well as those
from ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/hurd.  Here are some problems.

The jtobey scripts seem to be easier to use, even if they are
older, since they allowed me to specify dists/sid/main/binary-hurd
on the command line instead of copying all the deb files into
one directory.

Both sets of scripts failed when I had my default umask of 066.
This may be a 'religious' option, but it would be easy enough
to set the umask 022 in the script and avoid potential problems.

Both install procedures advise booting from a GRUB disk which
does not in fact work.  The disk's menu.lst file has the commands

     root=   (hd0,a)
     kernel= /boot/gnumach root=hd0a
     module= /boot/serverboot

In fact, the disk has no (hd0,a) partition if you follow the
instructions in the procedures above, and both procedures install
/boot/gnumach.gz and /boot/serverboot.gz, so the commands will
always fail.  I was able to boot using

     root=   (hd0,1)
     kernel= /boot/gnumach.gz root=hd0s2 -s
     module= /boot/serverboot.gz

which, as far as I can tell, should have worked.  The Hurd actually
starts booting, but it fails when it tries to run e2fsck.static on
the root partition, from which I infer that the argument 'hd0s2'
in not quite correct.

     -- Owen
     LeBlanc@mcc.ac.uk