GNU Hurd Talk

[Lovechild]

"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people."
-Linus Torvalds

Linus Torvalds, one of the great communicators of the 21th century.

You shouldn't listen to much to him on these matters, Linus is known to be against microkernels for his own reasons. It doesn't make him the keeper of the ultimate truth.

HURD does rather well considering that they have maybe 5 active developers at any given time and have been forced to switch the underlying microkernel a number of times to reach what they deem a good system.

However HURD might be irrelevant as a Linux replacement the next decade because it's simply not supported by as many people as Linux is, nor developed for that matter.

If you want an off the shelf Open Source OS to replace Linux, OpenSolaris and the BSDs are quite acceptable choices today. HURD might take a little longer to get to the same level, but I have no doubt that it will eventually get there.

[prizrak]

The HURD project is pretty much dead. It is quite possibly the victim of what Torvalds said about microkernel OS's. The messaging system between the kernel and it's parts is way too complex to be useful and too bug prone. Microkernels work well in real time and embedded OS's where there is a limited number of devices to interact with and hardware is largely uniform. In a PC environment there is way too much stuff to pass around. Microkernel OS's also tend to be harder to develop.

[RAV TUX]

I burned the iso image of Debian Hurd K11, I couldn't get it to run but it may have been errors on my part. I have also been unsuccessful to get SUSE, Fedora, Scientific Linux and Mepis to run. So this isn't exactly an exclusive negative against the Hurd.

The default partitioning tool in the Hurd install is easier and more superior then any I have used.

[detyabozhye]

But do they have any logs, feeds, whatever so u can follow the developement anyway?

[Virogenesis]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd has a bit about it and what have you incase anyone wants to know anymore.

[Rhapsody]

I do like the indirect recursive acronym of HURD (where HURD stands for HIRD of Unix-Replacing Daemons, and HIRD stands for HURD of Interfaces Representing Depth) but I think the complexity of trying to actually remember all that speaks for the whole system. It'd be nice if some sort of stable version emerged some day, but it's classic vapourware at the moment. Sounds great, but when can we actually use it?

[RAV TUX]

currently installing GNU Hurd, I was wondering if any of my fellow Ubuntu users have had experience with the Hurd? Specifically: Debian K11 GNU Hurd.

Rich, have you tried it?

[hizaguchi]

I messed around with installing it a while back, but the documentation is kinda sparse and scattered around the internet, and different guides conflict with each other quite a bit. Considering all of this, and the fact that the OS is so unfinished that wireless networking (a must for my laptop) is not yet finished, my attention span wore thin after the 2nd attempt to get it to boot.

It's a cool idea, and I'm all about supporting Gnu, but it's not ready for my needs yet.

[RAV TUX]

I messed around with installing it a while back, but the documentation is kinda sparse and scattered around the internet, and different guides conflict with each other quite a bit. Considering all of this, and the fact that the OS is so unfinished that wireless networking (a must for my laptop) is not yet finished, my attention span wore thin after the 2nd attempt to get it to boot.

It's a cool idea, and I'm all about supporting Gnu, but it's not ready for my needs yet.

I haven't done enough drugs to appreciate GNU Hurd.

[TravisNewman]

I've had it up and running once. It's a pain. Really not worth the trouble honestly. I hope it gets better, but the Linux, Solaris, and BSD kernels are already enough to suffice for me.