Arch Hurd

Well, we've been without mailing lists since we switched from DreamHost to Linode, but no more! You can subscribe to the new devel@archhurd.org mailing list by emailing devel+subscribe@archhurd.org, and the archives (from now onwards; the old ones were lost) can be found, as before, at lists.archhurd.org

May and June are the time of exams, so things have been slow around here lately, however today I Michael Walker (Barrucadu) 'finished' writing an installation script for the Arch Hurd LiveCD, which can be downloaded here! The script can be used to install an Arch Hurd base system similar to what you get after installing Arch Linux with a few caveats:

• locale-gen causes the LiveCD to freeze, and so isn't run. You'll need to do so once you boot up your installation.
• grub-install just doesn't work, so you need to have a GRUB floppy (or something) on hand to manually install GRUB - though the livecd configures it just find and puts things in the correct places.

Additionally, the Arch Hurd Installation Guide on the wiki has been renamed to Alternative Installation Guide, and a new Installation Guide which covers installation using the LiveCD has been begun. Of course, please report any problems in the installer.

Packaging has been a little slow since we finished Xorg, so to make up for that, the website has gained some pretty useful functionality over the past few days.

Firstly, I would like to announce the creation of a new Web Team, consisting of myself, Michael Walker (Barrucadu) and Jordan Roy (daedhel). The idea behind this is that it'll be easier to make changes and work on new things when it's not just me - particularly if I become unavailable for a period of time.

Secondly, and you may have noticed this a couple of days ago, we now have an AUR. The Archlinux User Repository has been copied over and installed on this server. A big thank you to the developers of the AUR, who have made such a useful piece of software. In addition, using the 'official' AUR should make it quite trivial to port existing AUR helpers to Arch Hurd.

Finally, and not leastly, our own forum has sprung into existence. We are using FluxBB, the same software as the Arch BBS, so you should find it easy to adapt.

These have been a busy two weeks for the Arch Hurd team, Alexander Preisinger (giselher) decided, fuelled by his now amazing package-building powers by using Arch Hurd on real hardware, to begin packaging Xorg 1.8 for Arch Hurd, which made it in to extra today. We don't have many graphical programs yet, but we have a window manager (openbox) and terminal (xterm) - enough to start with.

Secondly, but not less important, is the creation of an Arch Hurd LiveCD by Michael Walker (barrucadu). Whilst still only an initial prototype version with no setup program, we have Arch Hurd booting from your (IDE) CD/DVD drive, and running fine. There seems to be a problem with amd64 processors, however, so if you try the livecd with an AMD processor, I (Barrucadu) would be interested to know what happens.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank people without whom this project could not have happened. Archlinux developers; Debian developers; and of course Hurd developers, you people are the greatest.

• Download LiveCD
• Xorg Screenshot

Well, a lot has happened since the last news item, this could be considered a little overdue.

Firstly, Matthias Lanzinger (melpo) has ported the Arch Linux initscripts to Arch Hurd. There is just something amazing about seeing Hurd boot up with the familiar-looking boot output... Whilst not yet working perfectly due to missing things elsewhere in Arch Hurd, this is still a great achievement.

Secondly, an update to the Hurd allows ext2 partitions bigger than 2GB to be used. Obviously, this is of great use to everybody, especially packagers or others who work with a large amount of files.

Along with initscripts came multi-user mode by default. Multi-user mode allows some niceties, such as a VGA console, similar to virtual consoles in Linux. Additionally, with the inclusion of shadow in core, users can now have passwords and adding more users is simple.

Coming to the end of the to-write list; Arch Hurd now has over one hundred packages. Considering that there are only three developers currently, this is a huge achievement. But there doesn't need to be only three, you can contribute too! The Arch Hurd Wiki was started recently, and already has a fairly good installation guide with troubleshooting, sure to be useful for those trying to install Arch Hurd for the first time.

And finally, Alexander Preisinger (giselher) has managed to run Arch Hurd on his laptop. This is, as far as we're aware, the first use of Arch Hurd outside a VM, so this is definitely a huge milestone! A photo can be seen on his user page in the wiki.

• Wiki
• Installation Guide
• Contributing
• Laptop