Crash and burn...
I'm new to this list, and wanted to ask some questions as it becomes more
and more apparent that I suck! ;-)
Anyway, I've installed the Hurd, trashed my filesystem, reformatted,
reinstalled, and trashed my filesystem again about five times now, and I
thought I'd relate some of my experiences (and possibly even get some
answers to questions!)
First, I fdisk'd a 2.5 gig drive into four partitions: 3 ext2 and 1 swap;
installed Hurd on the first partition, XFree86 4.0 source on second
partition, third for scratch, fourth as swap. It all boots OK, swap
works, ethernet works, etc.
Next, I tried using dselect to install some packages. I actually tried
doing this by FTP at first, but when it came time to install the packages
I had selected I ended up getting a "(default pager): dropping
data_request because of previous paging errors" message. I tried getting
out by many various means, but no such luck, I just had to hit the reset
button. This sort of screwed up my filesystem, but at least I could
reboot, fsck, and continue. This brings me to my first three questions:
1) in this context, does pager refer to programs like "less" and "more";
2) is there some sort of emergency key I can use to sync and unmount
partitions before rebooting; and 3) can I have virtual terminals via
Alt-Fn or something? Most of the time, errors I see are serious and
cause the machine to either go into some sort of loop or I get
permanently stuck at the login shell: it would be nice to exit gracefully
(thus sparing my filesystem). Occasionally, I get an error where nothing
is really wrong but I simply would like to switch to another terminal and
kill the offending process rather than rebooting.
Anyway, after some more fiddling and more crashes, I found that I had
wrecked my main partition. So I started over. This time, I downloaded a
bunch of packages onto my second partition and decided to install from
there. This went much better until I tried to actually install the
packages I had selected. I got a message that said something like this:
"internal error -e line 12". Hmmm. I decided to use dpkg instead.
OK, this was somewhat of a pain because I had to figure out dependencies
and everything, but it largely worked. At least, it largely worked until
I ran dpkg on several files at once; "dropping data_request" strikes
again! At this point, when I rebooted I found myself in a login shell
that wouldn't let me login. I could type "login root" and it would act
like it was logging me in, then it would just print all the login shell
messages again and I would be back from where I started. I tried logging
in as the user I had created for myself and it did the same thing! This
brings me to my next question: is there another login program available?
Anyway, I started over again. This time things went pretty smoothly. I
used dpkg separately for each package and it worked! However, there were
some dependency problems that I hadn't had before: bsdutils and friends
apparently rely on sysvinit. I couldn't find a sysvinit package on the
FTP site (shouldn't it already be installed?) Also, g++ wouldn't
configure without libstdc++ and libstdc++ wouldn't configure without g++!
This was annoying, but I had a mostly working system--yahoo! I
proceeded to build XFree 4.0 and most of it built. However, when trying
to link client applications, the linker couldn't find the appropriate
libraries. Of course, I needed to setup LD_LIBRARY_PATH in /etc/profile
and I did so. I also tried setting up ldconfig. It doesn't seem to work
the same way that it does in Linux. Any pointers?
At any rate, after playing with ldconfig, the system went down in flames.
The login problem manifested itself again.
I know this is a long post, but let me just finish by saying that none of
these things really turn me off, I just need a better understanding of
what's going on! Also, the install documentation for installing from
Linux was very fine.
Jason Clouse
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