Hurd Traffic #5 For 7 Jul 1999

By Zack Brown

Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?
Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on an OS you can try to modify for your needs?
Are you finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-nighters to get a nifty program working?
Then this post might be just for you :-)
 
-- Linus Torvalds, 1991

Table Of Contents

• Printer-Friendly Format
• Text Format
• XML Source
• Introduction
• Mailing List Stats For This Week
• Threads Covered

  1.	22 Jun 1999 - 23 Jun 1999	(5 posts)	Installation Troubles And Success
  2.	29 Jun 1999	(3 posts)	Pilot Error
  3.	28 Jun 1999 - 2 Jul 1999	(6 posts)	Linux/Hurd Compatibility
  4.	29 Jun 1999	(1 post)	glibc Upgrade; Site For Install Scripts; Alphas

Introduction

A very quiet list this week, with less than a quarter the volume of a couple weeks ago. There must be a lot of Americans working on Debian Hurd.

Mailing List Stats For This Week

We looked at 32 posts in 85K.

There were 14 different contributors. 9 posted more than once. 6 posted last week too.

The top posters of the week were:

• 10 posts in 31K by Ashutosh S. Rajekar <asr@giaspna.vsnl.net.in>
• 3 posts in 6K by Momchil Velikov <velco@fadata.bg>
• 2 posts in 6K by Roland McGrath <frob@debian.org>
• 2 posts in 6K by Mark Kettenis <kettenis@wins.uva.nl>
• 2 posts in 5K by Aymeric Vincent <cs61b-dq@cory.EECS.Berkeley.EDU>
• Full Stats

1. Installation Troubles And Success

22 Jun 1999 - 23 Jun 1999 (5 posts) Archive Link: "Tale of woes: hard copy"

People: Roland McGrath, Mark Kettenis

Ashutosh S. Rajekar finally got Hurd up and running after several months of bitter struggle. When he started this thread, he was still having trouble, and he'd written down all the inputs and outputs of his latest attempt, to post to the list. The final error was:

%%% /hurd/init: Cannot execute /bin/sh: No such file of directory
%%% init: rebooting Mach (flags 0) ...

and the machine would reboot. Roland McGrath said that either /bin/sh was missing (i.e. was not a symbolic link to 'bash'), or the dynamic linker (/lib/ld.so.1 or /lib/ld.so) was missing. But Ashutosh said no, all those things were there.

A week later, under the Subject: Installation, Ashutosh tried another install and got the same error. Momchil Velikov and Mark Kettenis offered various explanations, with no luck.

A few days later, Ashutosh posted success. Apparently his 'bash' package had had some kind of problem, and just replacing it with a new one got rid of the error.

2. Pilot Error

29 Jun 1999 (3 posts) Archive Link: "boot problem (Hurd server bootstrap: ...)"

Topics: FS: ext2

People: Thomas Bushnell

A short but sweet thread. During boot, Fabien Seisen was seeing:

Hurd server bootstrap: ext2fs.static[hd0s1] execext2fs.static:
../../libdiskfs/boot-start.c:416: Unexpected error: No such file or directory
memory_object_data_request(0x0, 0x100, 0x2000, 0x1000, 0x1) false

Thomas Bushnell said this meant that /servers/exec couldn't be found. Fabien replied that he'd forgotten to change his /etc/fstab. He fixed it and everything was alright. EOT.

3. Linux/Hurd Compatibility

28 Jun 1999 - 2 Jul 1999 (6 posts) Archive Link: "Lurker's Question"

People: Christopher B. Browne, Aymeric Vincent, Roland McGrath

Sajid S Raza decloaked after following the list for awhile, and asked why the decision was made to be so Linux-compatible. Specifically he wanted to know why so much effort was being put into porting programs (presumable Debian packages) to the Hurd. Roland McGrath replied that there was already a high degree of source compatibility because both systems used GNU libc. He added that the whole point of the Debian Hurd project was to port those Debian packages to the Hurd.

Christopher B. Browne added, "Is there some particular reason why you would think it preferable to *not* attempt some degree of compatibility?" to which Aymeric Vincent replied, "yop! Under Linux/m68k, user space starts at 0x8000000, which is a real problem on the Sun3, because it only has 28bit virtual address space... The Linux guys solved this by making Linux/sun3 incompatible with Linux/m68k... This sounds broken to me..."

4. glibc Upgrade; Site For Install Scripts; Alphas

29 Jun 1999 (1 post) Archive Link: "some changes here and there"

People: Marcus Brinkmann

Marcus Brinkmann announced the he'd put glibc 2.1.1-12 into the archive. He added that the main site for the install scripts was now www.debian.org, and noted that Alpha required kerberosV, which had not been packaged yet.

Sharon And Joy