Re: Debian Installer questions Re: Debian GNU/Hurd installation

[Samuel Thibault]

Svante Signell, le Tue 16 Nov 2010 22:39:13 +0100, a écrit :
> - Is it still maintained,

It hasn't been rebuilt, mostly due to lack of time (and interest, since
what we have now just works (no known bug), and is already commited or
submitted upstream, so should already be ok longterm-wise).

> latest development was made by Jeremie Koenig,
> in august 2010, right. He is no longer active as a developer?

He is merely back to school :)

There's a huge difference between a student working 100% on a project
and a student that has courses to attend, homework, etc. :)

> - Looks like Samuel made the installer work again with patched
> grub/parted, as well as committed the Debian Installer (D-I) patches by
> Jeremie?

Yes, a lot of things have been commited. Others are waiting for the
Squeeze release to see the Debian unfreeze, mostly.

> - The installer, contained in mini.iso has not been updated since August
> 17. Are there any plans to make the Debian GNU/Hurd installer up to date
> with the Debian GNU/Linux Installer, now at beta1, probably not?

I guess I should do a rebuild of e.g. some beta or rc, yes.

> What about the installer status for other OSes, like *BSD?

kfreebsd-* is supported and supposed to be working. Report any bug just
like for Linux ports, kfreebsd bugs are now considered like Linux bugs,
concerning the Squeeze release.

> - The other files at the web address above, seems to be part of the
> contents of mini,iso: boot/initrd.gz, boot/kernel/{ext2fs.static,
> gnumach.gz, ld.so.1}?

Yes. They permit more manual booting, like direct boot from some grub,
or in a subhurd, etc.

> - I have some comment on the installer defaults, like for a 4.3 GB qemu
> file, 4 GB goes into the / partition and only 224 Meg into the swap
> area, even with a memory parameter of 1G passed to qemu. I tried to
> change the defaults but had problems to create a first partition of 3.5
> GB at / and a logical 0.7G partition for swap. Also toggling the boot
> parameter did not work. Do somebody care about comments?

Report them the proper way (i.e. against partman packages), and they'll
surely care about them, yes :)

> - Looks like the mirror files at .../hurd-installer/mirror are still
> updated.

Yes. Jeremy has a cron entry for that.

> From where are they mirrored?

see the mirror/ directory: ftp.debian-ports.org, ftp.us.debian.org and
jk.fr.eu.org.

> BTW: I'll write up a short story how to install GNU/Hurd starting from
> the D-I image mini.iso up to a running X (in addition to Jeremies
> README.txt) with qemu and qemu-kvm if somebody is interested. Please let
> me know.

Well, ideally you should just rework the two existing pages:

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

so we can replace those with an up-to-date documentation.

Samuel