HURD, anyone?

[Mark]

I've been fighting the itch to download and set up HURD on a spare box at the
house.

Does anyone have any experience with its pitfalls? Can you compile GNU source
code in it?

Enquiring minds want to know.

--
"Phil, I *am* company policy."
Mark Stapleton, Paranet Screaming Eagles
(mlst...@sprintparanet.com)

[Richard Kettlewell]

mlst...@sprintparanet.com (Mark) writes:

> I've been fighting the itch to download and set up HURD on a spare
> box at the house.
>
> Does anyone have any experience with its pitfalls? Can you compile
> GNU source code in it?

You need to start from Linux or NetBSD to create the filesystem. I
started from Linux and got it working with relative ease - the BSDish
disc partitioning scheme is not familiar from Linux but the
instructions are clear.

The `Grub' boot loader is really quite nice once you're familiar with
it - it understands filesystems, removing the need for the kind of
nastiness LILO has to do to find a kernel.

You can compile things on it, including GNU source - I was running on
a 486 and it's not exactly optimized for speed right now, so in my
case doing this was far too painful to consider for very long.

The (AIUI largely user-space) IP stack was a bit slow too, with slower
machines (dx4/100 vs dx2/66) giving significantly faster ping RTTs
(over ethernet). I didn't try to stress it with weirdo packets or
anything.

I also found that the telnet login would occasionally screw up, though
randomly killing likely-looking processes sometimes helped.

I've since cannibalized the machine I was using, though the disc
hasn't been re-used yet.