gzipped tarball or CDs?

[Arnaud Delobelle]

Hello everyone

This weekend I installed the Hurd using the `tarball' method as
described in the user's guide.  Well it kind of worked, apart from
fsck who couldn't mount / ro, and google told me that I should add a
--readonly on the module line in my grub menu.lst, and also that my
tarball was too old, and that this fsck problem was fixed now.

Never mind I thought, it's running now.  Then I wanted to apt-get some
stuff so I set up the network, following the instructions on the
user's guide again (thanks for writing it).  I ran an apt-get update &
apt-get upgrade but this was very unwise, since now when I boot in
multiuser mode I can't login as anyone (even root).

I know I have an obsolete version of the tarball, so I'd like to
install a more up to date version of the Hurd.  I know that there are
iso images that are more recent, but it's not that easy for me to burn
CDs, and also I'd rather download packages when I need them than
3*650MB in one go (although I'll do it if it turns out to be the only
solution).  So here are my questions:

  1. Is there an up to date tarball (the one I got was from
ftp.gnu.org/gnu/hurd/contrib/marcus/gnu-latest.tar.gz -- from memory)?
If yes where is it?

  2. If I need to download CDs, should I get K2, and can I just
download CD1 and then apt-get things, or is it more reliable to get
the packages from the CDs?

Thanks for your help, and I apologize if my question has been answered
before / is irrelevant, but I'm unfamiliar with the Hurd and I don't
know my way around at all.

-- 
Arnaud Delobelle
delobelle@blueyonder.co.uk