Re: newbie

[kilobug@freesurf.fr (Gaël Le Mignot)]

Hello Ben!

Sun, 12 Jan 2003 09:57:19 -0500, you wrote: 

 > Hello.

 > I'm new to the hurd.  I'm impressed with how much I can do with it.
 > Here are a few things off the top of my head.  I'm sure most of
 > them can probably be answered with an "RTFM!" and a URL.

welcome :)

 > I'm confused about the debate about cross-installing.  (I admit, I
 > just joined the list a couple of days ago, so I didn't catch the
 > beginning.)  Less than a week ago, knowing almost nothing about
 > hurd, I found Neal's guide, followed it, and had no problem
 > cross-installing.  (What's not supposed to work?)

You used Marcus' tarball, which is a good choice, but that was not the
subject of the discussion, the discussion was about cross-installing
from scratch with dpkg-hurd and such, not using the tarball.

 > Is there a reliable implementation of /dev/random out there?  And
 > if so, why wasn't it packaged with the hurd?  (I confess that what
 > information I found online about it confused more than informed
 > me.)

There is a random translator on http://kilobug.free.fr/hurd/random-64.tar.gz 
(just a port of Marcus' random translator to the new API). It works,
but without a source of strong entropy (like the one that would be in
GNU Mach 2.0 aka OSKit Mach one day), it is not usable for "secure"
operations (like generating a private key, ...). So, yes, it gives out
uniform random data, but not cryptographically-safe ones.

 > I've downloaded a few 3rd-party sources and during compilation, I
 > notice that the C source files don't match the header files in
 > /include/hurd.  (One or two formal arguments don't match in a
 > handful of functions.)  What causes this discrepancy?  Is this an
 > ongoing problem?  (Put another way, do the hurd header files keep
 > changing?  If I ever take a crack at developing any system stuff, I
 > would want to be aware.)

There was an API change a couple of month ago to support large files and
64-bits platforms.

 > Is there a way to create and to access virtual terminals at boot
 > time?  I miss pressing Ctrl+Alt+F2 like with linux, and I'm tired
 > of having to hit the reset button when my shell hangs (since I
 > can't enter another shell to kill the offending process).  The only
 > "workaround" I have found is to enter X (which doesn't quite cut
 > it).

There is Marcus' console server and client, look in the mailing list
archive for instructions on how to set it up. You can use screen too.

 > I'm looking forward to using hurd and exploring the possibilities
 > of an open-source microkernel system.  I'll appreciate any help I
 > get.

No problem ;) (and please, we do Free Software, as in Freedom, not
opensource ;p)

-- 
Gael Le Mignot "Kilobug" - kilobug@nerim.net - http://kilobug.free.fr
GSM         : 06.71.47.18.22 (in France)   ICQ UIN   : 7299959
Fingerprint : 1F2C 9804 7505 79DF 95E6 7323 B66B F67B 7103 C5DA

Member of HurdFr: http://hurdfr.org - The GNU Hurd: http://hurd.gnu.org