Re: Retrospect: GNU/Hurd at LinuxTag 2003

[Robert Millan]

congrats Wolfgang! Sounds like really good press for the Hurd. :)

and good press for ReiserFS, too!

On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 09:00:36PM +0200, Wolfgang Jaehrling wrote:
> GNU/Hurd at LinuxTag 2003 in Karlsruhe
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
> 
> We had a machine running Debian GNU/Hurd at the FSF Europe booth
> (where one could meet me most of the time) and another one at the
> Debian booth.  There have been surprisingly many people asking about
> the Hurd.  Usually I was giving a short demonstration of the new
> console, adding and removing user-ids to tell what that is good for,
> showing the process list to explain a few of the servers (especially
> file systems and the password server) and telling them about file
> change notifications, often also mentioning ftpfs and the `run'
> translator.
> 
> The system crashed a few times during my demonstrations (it was not a
> very recent GNU/Hurd system), but usually all went fine and people
> were quite impressed.  People asked many questions, but the typical
> ones were ``How well does it work?'', ``What about driver support?'',
> ``What about other hardware architectures?'', ``What about L4?'' and
> ``Does X11 work?''; of course I answered the latter question just by
> smiling and entering `startx'.
> 
> On sunday afternoon, I was giving a presentation about the Hurd, which
> was scheduled to take one hour, of which I used only 35 minutes (plus
> a few for answering questions from people coming to me after the
> talk), This time, I decided to not go much into the details, but
> explaining what makes the Hurd cool and how it differs from POSIX-only
> systems, not forgetting to mention that the biggest advantage of
> GNU/Hurd is that it combines high compatiblity with a lot of
> additional flexibility.  For obvious reasons I tried to focus on
> saying what we already have achieved, rather than what we might do in
> the future.  Three people told me that the talk was great (and one
> said it was ``exciting''), and I hope there is some truth in that. ;-)
> However, since the talk was not in the official program, but merely in
> the (somewhat hidden) ``free workshop'' track, less than twenty people
> have been there.  We almost managed to have me give the presentation
> on a GNU/Hurd system itself, but unfortunatly we had a problem with
> the fonts in X11, and we failed to get it working before the talk, so
> I had to use GNU/Linux.
> 
> Two minor t-shirt-related points: 1. During the presentation, I was
> wearing a nice OpenBSD t-shirt, and I made clear that the goal of
> GNU/Hurd is not to replace GNU/Linux or other free operating systems;
> instead, all free systems should aim at replacing proprietary systems
> together.  2. Like last year, we sold Hurd t-shirts at the FSF Europe
> booth, which again sold well; Hans Reiser (developer of ReiserFS) also
> bought one (well, actually two) and I had the opportunity to speak
> with him a bit about our projects - It seems he likes the Hurd, but I
> guess it is now important for him to finish ReiserFS version 4, so
> don't even ask when ReiserFS will be ported to the Hurd.
> 
> In conclusion, the LinuxTag was certainly a success for us.  Many
> thanks to Volker Dormeyer for providing a GNU/Hurd machine and for
> helping in explaining the Hurd to visitors; just as many thanks to
> Michael Banck for supporting me with various aspects of the talk and
> also for bringing a GNU/Hurd machine.
> 
> Cheers,
> GNU/Wolfgang
> 
> PS: You can find the slides of my talk (only in german, sorry) at
> <http://www.8ung.at/shell/lt2003-hurd.tgz>
> 
> -- 
> "A good programming language should have features that make the kind
> of people who use the phrase `software engineering' shake their heads
> disapprovingly." -- Paul Graham
> 
> 
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-- 
Robert Millan