06 August 2024
... it Hurds again...
=====================

Well, its now a couple of months since i messed with Hurd,
my frustration has somewhat cooled off, and i found myself
with a little more time available, so i decided to grab my
old Thinkpad, download the 2023 netinstall iso from the
Debian page and give it another try. This time, the
installation was a walk in the park... everything just did
run smoothly and after about 1,5 hours i had a working
system.

This time i also followed a little step by step guide by
Almudena Garcia [1] that was really helpful in getting
everything running smoothly this time. I also started diving
a bit deeper into the mystery that are translators, the nice
little programs that help you to interact with the world on
Hurd. Just to use an example from the documentation:

To connect to an anonymous FTP server you would do the
following:

%<-----------------------------------------------

#Assuming you are in your home folder

settrans -c ftp: /hurd/hostmux /hurd/ftpfs /

%<-----------------------------------------------

This creates the file "ftp:" that you now can use to connect
to an FTP, just by cd-ing into it:

%<-----------------------------------------------

cd ftp:/username:password@yourftpserver.yourhost

%<-----------------------------------------------

You can now use this folder as any other folder on your
system. Oh, and the translator stays in this place even
through reboots until you tell it to disappear with
"settrans -g ftp:".

This time i have also set up an X11 environment using the
Window Maker windowmanager, which is lightweight enough to
feel nimble even on the constrained hardware of the Thinkpad
T60 in combination of the not-so-fast Mach kernel. I have
yet to dive deeper into the topic and discover which of the
debian packages i normaly use are fully functioning (i have
read that now about 80% of debian packages compile on Hurd)
and just explore the system more.

Regarding the state of the documentation and easily findable
information (and the whole state of affairs) everything
feels a bit like a trip back into the Linux days of
old... personally i somewhat like that challenge.


[1] https://gist.github.com/AlmuHS/f0c036631881756e817504d28217a910