Installing Debian hurd/i386

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Quick notes:

 - dhcp does not work.  Known problem, I think.
 - booting with a disk of >4 GiB fails, so I used 3 GiB.
 - various error messages about absent /proc/mounts, mtab, not enough
   memory for lvm, etc to ignore
 - installing GRUB as part of the installation fails:

	chroot: can't execute 'grub-probe': No such file or directory

 - menu item 'nobootloader' also fails:

	Wrong number of args: mapdevfs <path>

 - so menu item 'finish-install' fails
 - resulting disk does not boot on its own.

So to boot I tried entering from GRUB[1] on the installer CD:

	# set root fs
	root (hd0,msdos1)
	cat /boot/servers.boot
	multiboot /boot/gnumach.gz root=device:hd0s1
	module /hurd/ext2fs.static ext2fs \
		--multiboot-command-line='${kernel-command-line}' \
		--host-priv-port='${host-port}' \
		--device-master-port='${device-port}' \
		--exec-server-task='${exec-task}' -T typed '${root}' \
		'$(task-create)' '$(task-resume)'
	module /lib/ld.so.1 exec /hurd/exec '$(exec-task=task-create)'

For the first try, I used --readonly.  It booted partway and stoped at

	start ext2fs: Hurd server bootstrap: ext2fs[device:hd0s1] exec init proc auth 

After a few more tries, it mounts swap and then

	fsck from util-linux-ng 2.16.2
	hd2: irq timeout: status=0x50
	hd2: irq timeout: status=0x50
	hd2: irq timeout: status=0x50
	hd2: unexpected_intr: status=0x58
[etc]

I'll contact admin@strauss for an account. :)

Cheers.
Jonathan

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#GNU_002fHurd