Re: GNU Hurd Installation

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Tue, Nov 03, 2009 at 10:07:53PM +0100, Jakub Daniel wrote:

> I would love to know what to do with it to make it work.

Well, as Samuel hinted, making grub-install work from the Hurd involves
some non-trivial programming...

However, you can install GRUB from as rescue floppy or CD.

> http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/hurd-install gives us hints how to
> install xorg. but i cant meet the dependencies with the repositories
> listed on that site.

Yeah, unfortunately xorg is not installable right now from the stock
repositories -- tried it myself a few days ago.

If you are somewhat familiar with apt-get and friends, you could try to
install some older packages from snapshot.debian.net.

> the same problem with packages like emacs,

I didn't try installing emacs, but I guess it's the same here. Packages
are quite often temporarily uninstallable for us :-(

It would be helpful if you listed the exact problem you got.

> mount..

There is no mount package for the Hurd. There is a wrapper script; but
it's better to learn using settrans directly instead of mount :-)

> i also wonder how does the login part work.. when someone boots hurd
> he gets logged as some wierd user...

This is a very special Hurd feature: the login shell runs as a
(non-)user with no UID...

There is a special set of additional file permission bits, which can be
used to limit what non-users can access. However, I have no clue how to
change that...

> is it possible to disable that so that no one but registered users can
> access the system?

Yes, there is an option somewhere to use a "traditional" login prompt --
but I don't remember where.

-antrik-