Re: Scripts to build a Hurd distro

[Justus Winter]

Hi David :)

Quoting David Michael (2015-01-04 23:40:03)
> I've uploaded updates to my Hurd build scripts for Fedora 21, so I
> thought I'd send a note about it in case it helps anyone else out there
> who is interested in building Hurd outside Debian.  (The project has
> actually bloated into a fairly complete distro itself at this point.)
> It can be downloaded from https://github.com/dm0-/gnuxc .  Here are some
> nifty things it can do:
> 
> * It runs GNU dmd as PID 1, with service definitions like mcron, lsh,
>   syslog, and the Hurd console client.
> 
> * It has a Guile/Make file to bootstrap and build all the cross-compiler
>   RPMs in parallel with proper dependency tracking.
> 
> * It can use your CPU to heat your home or office.

Most impressive!

For someone who isn't a Fedora user, is there an image I can download
and just boot to play around with?  Also, do you hang out with the
Guix people?  If not, you should ;).  Also, are you in #hurd?

> * It includes a Linux-libre kernel with a statically linked QEMU so that
>   it is still possible to boot Hurd virtually on machines with
>   unsupported hardware.  (I use this for a Live CD type of setup and EFI
>   booting.)

Heh, nice hack.  Note though that for the Hurd, booting from a CD
isn't much different than booting from a hard drive.  grub-mkrescue
creates bootable cd/hd/usb images, from there on it's just a matter of
bootstrapping the Hurd the same way it is done for a normal
installation.  Of course then you have iso9660fs as rootfs, which is
readonly, which causes problems for the "userland" bootstrap.

Cheers,
Justus