Install Experiences

[Jonathan Bartlett]

I've been looking at the HURD for a long time, and finally I got a machine
at work to dive in with.  Anyway, here's my experiences.

1) I tried the CD (hurd-D1).  I couldn't figure out what to do to boot
it.  I tried writing the "linux" image to disk, but it just gave me errors
when I tried to boot from it.

2) I tried the cross-install script using the packages from the CD, no
luck there

3) I used the tarball filesystem, rebooted into single-user mode.  That
worked pretty well.  Trying to keep the GRUB/HURD names straight is always
a problem.  Especially since I was on a SCSI drive, and GRUB wanted hd and
HURD wanted sd.  Anyway, it booted.  I ran native-install, which appeared
to go well.  Rebooted.

4) No fstab was there, so it went back to single-user mode.  It took me a
while to figure out that all of the .dpkg-new files needed to have that
extension removed.  Then, later, I figured out that dselect would
configure your packages.  Anyway, finally I got a login prompt
(woohoo!) followed by a real console (with control-c and everything).

5) Currently only having real problems with my SCSI cdrom (cd0).  The hurd
ISOFS translator hangs whenever I try to use it.  Very bizaare.  

Just to note - I love fsysopts!  Great command.  I'm still not totally
sure how the whole bootup process works, though.  What exactly does
serverboot.gz do?  How does HURD go about initializing the
system?  Where does it store information about translators?  Anyway, it
seems to be running well.  The network card worked wonderfully
(3c59x).  The only thing about it is that, because I hadn't used it yet,
the translator hadn't started, and thus pinging it did nothing.  Maybe the
startup scripts could do a ping to start up the network
interfaces?  Sysadmins like to be able to ping their machines
ASAP.  Anyway, once I figure things out a little more and get a more
functional setup, I might be able to contribute some stuff.

Jon


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