Debian GNU/Hurd 9.0 "Stretch" - Unofficial hurd-i386 20170612-21:28

Welcome to the exciting world of
Debian GNU/Hurd

This directory contains CD images and pre-installed images for the Debian
GNU/Hurd distribution.

Debian is a very extensive collection of software. But it is more. It
is a complete Operating System (OS) for your computer. And it is free
(as in "freedom").

This release is a snapshot of Debian sid at the time of the Stretch release,
so it is mostly based on Stretch. It however also contains a few patched
packages (seen by +hurd suffix in the version).

This is *not* part of the official Debian Stretch release. This is however a
release of the Debian GNU/Hurd port.

Table of content
****************

* Pre-installed images
* Installer CD images
* Small Examples on Using Translators

Pre-installed image
********************

To give Debian GNU/Hurd a try, it is probably easier to simply run the
preinstalled image, which is provided here:

$ wget http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/9.0/hurd-i386/debian-hurd.img.tar.xz
$ tar xJf debian-hurd.img.tar.xz

It can be run directly in qemu/kvm (make sure that you can access /dev/kvm to
get full KVM speed):

$ kvm -drive file=$(echo debian-hurd*.img),cache=writeback -m 1G

It can also be run in virtualbox, by first converting to VDI format :

$ VBoxManage convertfromraw debian-hurd*.img debian-hurd.vdi --format vdi

You can then just log in as root without a password.
The qemu/kvm -curses option can be used to run it in text mode, which can help
with the keyboard layout, but it's better to simply reconfigure the layout by
running

dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

Please make sure to read

http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install

for other configuration information as well as the FAQ:

http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq.html

or its latest version on

http://darnassus.sceen.net/~hurd-web/faq/

and known open issues

http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/open_issues.html

All the debian-hurd.img* files are the same, they are just in various
format, because it has been reported that some tools are not able to cope with
the sparse tar format. The .tar.gz is still the preferred, as it will produce a
sparse file on your disk. You can compare the resulting .img file with the
MD5SUMS file

Installer CD images
*******************

To test the installer images with kvm/qemu:

* Download:

$ wget http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/9.0/hurd-i386/iso-dvd/debian-hurd-2017-i386-DVD-1.iso
# apt-get install qemu-kvm

* Create a hard disk image:

$ kvm-img create hurd-install.qemu 3G

* Start the installation:

Since we haven't yet optimized the installer initrd mechanism for memory
usage at all you will need at least 500MB of memory even for the text
installer (about 1G for the graphical installer), or the installer will
likely crash due to missing memory.

$ kvm -m 1G -drive file=hurd-install.qemu,cache=writeback -cdrom debian-hurd-2015-i386-DVD-1.iso -boot d

Note the gnome and kde desktop are not yet completely installable and
working. The LXDE desktop is preferred, or even just icewm etc.

On real hardware:

* Note that in addition to support for IDE, GNU Mach has drivers for SATA
devices, but only in AHCI mode, not in RAID mode.

* Installation CDs include the 2.6.32 Linux network drivers, and should
thus cover a wide range of network boards. There is however no support for
firmware loading.

* There is no support for wireless network devices.

* There are no USB stick drivers, so images can be used only on real CD/DVD
media.

When going through the installation:

* Reminder for qemu: with the user network stack default configuration,
use the following values:

IP address: 10.0.2.15
Netmask: 255.255.0.0
Gateway: 10.0.2.2
Nameserver: 10.0.2.3

Remarks:

* /usr or /usr/local on separate filesystem is not supported yet.

Configuring the installed system:

* Make sure to see http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install.html for
more details and network / filesystems / X configuration.

* Also make sure to check the FAQ

http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq.html

or the latest version on

http://darnassus.sceen.net/~hurd-web/faq/

and known open issues

http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/open_issues.html

Email us to <debian-hurd@lists.debian.org> for debian-specific things or
<bug-hurd@gnu.org> for non-debian-specific things if you have questions or
comments, We are also available on #hurd on Freenet, #debian-hurd on OFTC.

Small Examples on Using Translators
***********************************

The concept of user-space servers, translators, is a very powerful one. Here is
an introductionary text.

Intro

The Hurd has some unique capabilities, and we created this simple image to
enable you to easily try three of them:

â˘ The simplest of translators: Hello World!
â˘ Transparent FTP
â˘ Mount a remote ISO file

Hello World

To try out the simplest of translators, you can go the following simple steps:

$ touch hello
$ cat hello
$ settrans hello /hurd/hello
$ cat hello
"Hello World!"
$ settrans -g hello
$ cat hello

What you do with these steps is first verifying that the file "hello" is empty.

Then you setup the translator /hurd/hello in the file/node hello.

After that you check the contents of the file, and the translator returns
"Hello World!".

To finish it, you remove the translator from the file "hello" (and tell any
active running instances to go away) via "settrans -g hello". Having done that,
verify that now the file is empty again.

Transparent FTP

We already setup a a transparent FTP translator for you at /ftp:

With it you can easily access public FTP via the file system, for example the
one from the GNU project:

$ ls /ftp://ftp.gnu.org/

But you can also do this very easily yourself:

$ # Setup the translator on the node ftp:
$ settrans -c ftp: /hurd/hostmux /hurd/ftpfs /

and you can access FTP sites via the pseudo-directory ftp:, for example with

$ ls ftp://ftp.gnu.org/

What you do here is setting up the translator /hurd/hostmux on ftp: and passing
it the translator /hurd/ftpfs to use for resolving accesses as well as / as
additional path component.

ISO file mount

Now that we can access ftp.gnu.org transparently, let's mount a remote ISO
file:

$ settrans -c mnt /hurd/iso9660fs ftp://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/gnu-f2/hurd-F2-main.iso
$ ls mnt/

It is interesting to note that since the ISO9660 format is indexed, ftpfs does
not have to download the whole ISO file, it merely fetches what iso9660fs
requests.

These were only three basic usages of translators on the Hurd. We're sure
you'll quickly see many other ways to use this.

As a last comment: You can setup a translator on any node you have access to,
so you can for example mount any filesystems as normal user.

You might currently be logged in as root, but you could just as well do the
same as normal user.

Why don't you try it out?

Links: documentation faq/still useful news/2013-05-debian gnu hurd 2013
translator
Copyright ÂŠ 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License:

GFDL 1.2+

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the
terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version
published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no
Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included
in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.

Last edited Mon, 12 Jun 2017 22:41:03 +0000