My experience with Hurd

[Dave Kimmel <criscokid@v-wave.com>]

A few days ago I decided that, just to see what its like, I'd install Hurd
and poke at it for a bit.

It took me a number of tries to get it to install and I had to work a
bunch of magic that didn't seem to be documented in the Hurd installtion
guides that I looked at (the one at debian.org, the Easy Guide, and the
one at web.walfield.org).  So I just want to tell everyone what I think
is missing from the doucmentation and possibly take a roasting for missing
something really stupid somewhere.

First, I installed Hurd using the tarball and then tried to update it -
that didn't work, but I couldn't figure out why.

So I decided to use cross-install.  That didn't work either since I was
running the release Debian 2.2, not woody.  Once I got woody installed,
cross-install went a lot better.

The problem I had with cross-install was that a bunch of packages that
libc0.2 depended on were not fetched and installed.  These are libnss-db
libdb2-util.  Somehow I think there might be more, but those are the only
ones in my notes, so that must be it.

Next up were the dependancy problems in native-install.  The dpkg line
that configures libc0.2 also needs to have libnss-db, libdb2, libdb2-util
and hurd on it since these are all dependancies.  Libc0.2 doesn't
configure without them, and nothing else configures since everything
depends on libc0.2.  At least, that's my limited understanding of it.

This leads to a few errors later on about packages already configured, but
eventually leads to a very functional Hurd installation.

So did I do the right thing here?  Is this a problem with the scripts and
docs, or did I stupidly overlook something that was printed somewhere in
20 point bold?

Anyways, Hurd is, imho, really cool!  I look forward to the day when
Debian GNU/Hurd has all the polish that Debian GNU/Linux has!

-- Dave Kimmel
   criscokid@v-wave.com 
   ICQ: 5615049