Debian GNU/Hurd 2023 "Bookworm" - Unofficial hurd-i386 20230607-22:16


                      Welcome to the exciting world of
                               Debian GNU/Hurd

   This directory contains CD images and pre-installed images for the Debian
   GNU/Hurd distribution.

   Debian is a very extensive collection of software. But it is more. It
   is a complete Operating System (OS) for your computer. And it is free
   (as in "freedom").

   This release is a snapshot of Debian sid at the time of the Bookworm release,
   so it is mostly based on Bookworm. It however also contains a few patched
   packages (seen by +hurd suffix in the version).

   This is *not* part of the official Debian Bookworm release. This is however a
   release of the Debian GNU/Hurd port.



Table of content
****************

* Foreword
* Preparing execution with KVM
* Pre-installed image
* Installer CD images
* Small Examples on Using Translators


Foreword
********

GNU/Hurd is not Linux.

Please do read this README to know what you really need to know before trying
GNU/Hurd.

We do not have large teams of testers, so if you deviate from what is advised in
this README, you'll probably get into untested area, so bugs could show up that
we just have never met and thus never fixed of course. Contributions welcome!


Preparing execution with KVM
****************************

If you are already used to run KVM at full speed, you can skip this section.

Install kvm:

      $ sudo apt install qemu-kvm

Make sure that you can access /dev/kvm to get full KVM speed (otherwise KVM will
be terribly slow). You can easily check with

      $ file -s /dev/kvm

that you properly get "ERROR: cannot read `/dev/kvm' (Invalid argument)",
which means that "file" was properly able to open kvm, just not smart enough
to use it :)

If you get "cannot open `/dev/kvm' (No such file or directory)", check in your
BIOS setup to make sure that accelerated virtualization is activated, and make
sure that the kvm_intel module is loaded.

If you get "no read permission", make sure you give your user permissions to use
kvm:

      $ sudo adduser $USER kvm

and log-out and log-in again.


Pre-installed image
*******************


To give Debian GNU/Hurd a try, it is probably safer to simply run the
preinstalled image, which is provided here:

      $ wget http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/12.0/hurd-i386/debian-hurd.img.tar.xz
      $ tar xJf debian-hurd.img.tar.xz

All the debian-hurd.img* files are the same, they are just in various
format, because it has been reported that some tools are not able to cope with
the sparse tar format. The .tar.xz is still the preferred, as it will produce a
sparse file on your disk. You can compare the resulting .img file with the
MD5SUMS file

It can be run directly in qemu/kvm.


Execution with KVM
==================

      $ kvm -m 1G -drive file=$(echo debian-hurd*.img),cache=writeback

If you don't have the kvm alias, use qemu-system-i386 -enable-kvm

You can then just log in as demo or root user without a password.

It is often convenient to connect through ssh to the box, instead of logging on
the console, this can be done by forwarding the ssh port:

      $ kvm -net user,hostfwd=tcp:127.0.0.1:2222-:22 -net nic,model=e1000 -drive file=$(echo debian-hurd*.img),cache=writeback -m 1G

then setting a password to the demo user with

      passwd demo

and then you can connect through ssh:

      ssh demo@localhost -p 2222

One can increase the size of the image with e.g.:

      $ qemu-img resize debian-hurd*.img +5G
      $ parted debian-hurd*.img
      (parted) resizepart 2 100%
      (parted) quit
      $ sudo losetup -o $((512*1953792)) /dev/loop0 debian-hurd*.img
      $ sudo resize2fs /dev/loop0
      $ sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0

(1953792 is the start sector shown in fdisk -l debian-hurd*.img)


If you want to give access to a CD image, you can add

      -cdrom /path/to/image.iso

or

      -cdrom /dev/cdrom


Execution with VirtualBox
=========================

The image can also be run in virtualbox (though it is *much* less tested, so it
is strongly recommended that you rather use kvm as explained above), by first
converting to VDI format :

      $ VBoxManage convertfromraw debian-hurd.img debian-hurd.vdi --format vdi

and then load it into VirtualBox. Make sure to give at least 1G memory to the
VM.

You can then just log in as demo or root user without a password.


Using the system
================

Here are just a couple hints, be sure to read

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

for more information.


One can reconfigure the layout by running

      $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration


One can choose the timezone by setting its name in /etc/timezone


Don't forget to call

      $ sudo apt update

to get the repositories information before trying to install packages.


One can safely shut down the system with

      $ sudo poweroff


Installer CD images
===================

ISO installer images are available on
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/12.0/hurd-i386/


  * Download:

      $ wget http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/12.0/hurd-i386/iso-cd/debian-hurd-2023-i386-NETINST-1.iso
      # apt install qemu-kvm

  * Create a hard disk image:

      $ qemu-img create hurd-install.qemu 3G

  * Start the installation:

    Since we haven't yet optimized the installer initrd mechanism for memory
    usage at all you will need at least 500MB of memory even for the text
    installer (about 1G for the graphical installer), or the installer will
    likely crash due to missing memory.

      $ kvm -m 1G -drive file=hurd-install.qemu,cache=writeback -cdrom debian-hurd-2023-i386-NETINST-1.iso -boot d

    Note the gnome and kde desktop are not yet completely installable and
    working. The XFCE desktop is preferred, or even just icewm (by default).
    Note however that since the snapshot mirror, that we have to use as archive
    source, is very slow, installing a desktop can be very long and actually
    even fail out of snapshot being overloaded. It may be simpler to just not
    install a desktop during the initial installation, and install it later with
    apt, which will make it simpler to resume package download etc.

On real hardware:

  * Note that in addition to support for IDE, GNU Mach has drivers for SATA
    devices, but only in AHCI mode, not in RAID mode.

  * Installation CDs include the 2.6.32 Linux network drivers, and should
  thus cover a wide range of network boards. There is however no support for
  firmware loading.

  * There is no support for wireless network devices, nor for sound yet.

When going through the installation:

  * Reminder for qemu: with the user network stack default configuration,
    use the following values:

       IP address: 10.0.2.15
       Netmask: 255.255.0.0
       Gateway: 10.0.2.2
       Nameserver: 10.0.2.3

Remarks:

  * /usr or /usr/local on separate filesystem is not supported yet.


Note: daily/weekly/monthly installer snapshots are additionally available on
https://people.debian.org/~sthibault/hurd-i386/installer/cdimage/
to get the latest versions of everything. They are however NOT ACTUALLY TESTED,
it might happen that they just do not even work at all. Really better use the
images mentioned above.


Configuring the installed system
================================


Please make sure to read

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

for other configuration information (network / filesystems / X) as well as the
FAQ:

    http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq.html

or its latest version on

    http://darnassus.sceen.net/~hurd-web/faq/

and known open issues

    http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/open_issues.html


Email us to <debian-hurd@lists.debian.org> for debian-specific things or
<bug-hurd@gnu.org> for non-debian-specific things if you have questions or
comments, We are also available on #hurd on Freenet, #debian-hurd on OFTC.





Small Examples on Using Translators
===================================

The concept of user-space servers, Translators, is a very powerful one. Here is
an introductionary text.

Intro

The Hurd has some unique capabilities, and we created this simple image to
enable you to easily try three of them:

  • The simplest of translators: Hello World!
  • Transparent FTP
  • Mount a remote ISO file

Hello World

To try out the simplest of translators, you can go the following simple steps:

$ touch hello
$ cat hello
$ settrans hello /hurd/hello
$ cat hello
"Hello World!"

$ fsysopts hello
/hurd/hello --contents='Hello World!
'
$ fsysopts hello --contents='Hello GNU!
> '
$ cat hello
Hello GNU!

$ settrans -g hello
$ cat hello

What you do with these steps is first creating the file "hello" and verifying
that it is empty.

Then you setup the translator /hurd/hello in the file/node hello.

After that, you check the contents of the file, and the translator returns
"Hello World!".

Because you are a curious hacker, you wonder what filesystem options this node
has. It turns out that the hello translator uses a "contents" option. We can
change what the hello translator returns with another call to fsysopts.

To finish it, you remove the translator from the file "hello" (and tell any
active running instances to go away) via "settrans --g hello", which is
shorthand for "settrans --goaway hello" Having done that, verify that now the
file is empty again.

Transparent FTP

We already setup a a transparent FTP translator for you at /ftp:

With it you can easily access public FTP via the file system, for example the
one from the GNU project:

$ ls /ftp://ftp.gnu.org/

But you can also do this very easily yourself:

$ # Setup the translator on the node ftp:
$ settrans -c ftp: /hurd/hostmux /hurd/ftpfs /

and you can access FTP sites via the pseudo-directory ftp:, for example with

$ ls ftp://ftp.gnu.org/

What you do here is setting up the translator /hurd/hostmux on ftp: and passing
it the translator /hurd/ftpfs to use for resolving accesses as well as / as
additional path component.

ISO file mount

Now that we can access ftp.gnu.org transparently, let's mount a remote ISO
file:

$ settrans -c mnt /hurd/iso9660fs ftp://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/gnu-f2/hurd-F2-main.iso
$ ls mnt/

It is interesting to note that since the ISO9660 format is indexed, ftpfs does
not have to download the whole ISO file, it merely fetches what iso9660fs
requests.

These were only three basic usages of translators on the Hurd. We're sure
you'll quickly see many other ways to use this.

As a last comment: You can setup a translator on any node you have access to,
so you can for example mount any filesystems as normal user.

You might currently be logged in as root, but you could just as well do the
same as normal user.

Why don't you try it out?

Links: documentation faq/still useful news/2013-05-debian gnu hurd 2013
translator
Copyright © 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License:

GFDL 1.2+

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the
terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version
published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no
Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included
in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.

Last edited 2019-03-27 18:45:55 CET