Re: [OT]: GNU/Hurd ready for a daily use (?)
On Fri, Aug 08, 2003 at 12:23:01PM +0200, Xavier Maillard wrote:
> Robert Millan <zeratul2@wanadoo.es> writes:
>
> On Fri, Aug 08, 2003 at 10:36:33AM +0200, Xavier Maillard wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I currently use GNU/Hurd at home but only to test few of my
> > > developments on this platform.
> > >
> > > Till now, I didn't think to switch to GNU/hurd definetely. I have
> > > reached a point where I would like to use only GNU/Hurd at home. Do
> > > you honestly think this is a crazy idea or does anybody has
> > > definetely choose to use GNU/Hurd for daily tasks (mail,
> > > programming, web, multimedia, ...).
> > >
> > > I really need feedback on that ;)
> >
> > It depends on what you need. If you need GNOME/KDE or stability or
> > good performance then GNU is not ready for you yet. As for web and
> > multimedia we don't have any sound support and we still don't have a
> > ported major browser (Mozilla, Galeon, etc)
>
> The main purpose would be to have my current real simple setup
> (X+Ion+zsh+Emacs+gcc) into the GNU.
>
> And maybe I could begin to help in making
> development/packaging/whatever.
>
> All I need is at leat a shell, emacs (and stuff that comes with it:
> bbdb, gnus, ...) and also a simple w3m (my main browser here).
>
> Is it possible then ??
I tried some time ago. It was possible but there were some problems.
I could run lynx&mutt&vi/screen or compile something. But compiling
slowed down the thing to a crawl (some Pentimum MMX 266, but I think
the disk was the weak part).
Short after switching to Oskit-mach there were some changes to the Hurd that
made ext2 so unstable that compiling anything larger became near impossible
and nightly cron jobs killed the Hurd almost for certain.
Not only it was unstable but the ext2 filesystem on disk got corrupted by
any larger upgrade with apt-get which made the system effectively
uninstallable for me.
Earlier it could sometimes survive the weekly cron jobs. But it usually died
at the beginning of the next week when I tried to do something.
Mutt checking for mail was beating the ext2 translator slowly to death.
Quitting mutt when I was leaving improved uptimes quite a bit. Using
mailboxes instead of maildirs would put less stress on the ext2 translator but
I would not do that on a filesystem that is likely to get corrupted.
--
Michal Suchanek
hramrach@centrum.cz
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