Oh it HURDs...
===============

I think i have some undiagnosed masochistic tendencies,
because i am constantly drawn to ever more esorteric and
fringe operating systems and software that will make my
life a little bit harder.

The HURD is something that got my attention a long, long
time ago, as being this "mysterious next-gen OS that will
change everything". Well, it was the late 90s / early 00s,
the CD was still king and dialup was really expensive (at
least here in germany). I was already messing around with
linux and most of the time i compensated my utter lack of
knowledge with determination and pure madness.

It was some holiday back in the very early 00s when i
managed to get it installed on my (i think) pentium 133,
after spending way too long on our very slow dialup line
to download the necessary files from some GNU mirror
(and learning later that i burned through a whole lot
Deutsche Mark after my parents received the telephone bill)

Well, my adventure back then ended in an booting system
but without any recognized keyboard, and without really
knowing what i am doing (and in need of that PC for my
apprenticeship at that time) i threw the towel after some
really long nights without getting anywhere. Beaten and
defeated i reinstalled Windows and (i think) Debian Linux
again and went on to mess with other things. But somehow
(like with some other failed projects) it left a scar that
sometimes itches.

Now, fast forward about 20 years, its a very slow day at
the office, i have nothing really pressing to do and...
right out of the blue a GNU is sneaking into my thoughts.
I fired up a browser, skimmed the web about news regarding
my white whale and found out (somewhat to my surprise) that
Hurd is still in active development (even if its going
forward at an glacial pace). So, after having messed around
with some fairly exotic systems and (thinking to have) much
more experience than my teenage self i thought it is on time
to take a ride on this bovine again.

Debian Hurd seemed to me the most viable option, so i went
right on, downloaded three DVD images of 2021 vintage while
absolutely missing the very-not-missable news about an 2023
version until after i had already downloaded the images and
burned them to three disks. Well... one can always update
later, right?

So, i grabbed my "spare" Thinkpad T60 out of the cabinet,
looked at the HDD to make sure i had nothing there that i
needed and started the installation... nothing too exotic
there, its debian based after all...

After some time the installation was finished, i rebooted
into the new system and... FOXTROTT UNIFORM CHARLY KILO!!!
.. the keyboard wasn't working. WHY??? It did work in the
installer???

After reading through some sites on the net (and yes, i
understand the hardware support is slim, there are only a
handfull of developers left etc, etc...) and not wanting to
repeat my first encounter with the hurd i thought to myself:

Why not try it on the R60? So, i took the HD from the T60,
put it into the R60, started the installation again, just to
be sure, then the dreaded moment of the reboot came... AND
I HAD A WORKING KEYBOARD. YESSS!

So, now i started exploring this system i had waited about
20 years to get running, the GNU and debian sites give a
nice overview what does work in which ways, and after all,
its not THAT different from your standard GNU/Linux system.

An interesting concept is that of the "translators", just to
give an short example:

If you run the following in your home directory

%<-----------------------------------------------------

settrans -ac ftp /hurd/ftpfs ftp.gnu.org

%<-----------------------------------------------------

It creates the folder "ftp" wherein you will find the
content of ftp.gnu.org. Granted, for anyone who has worked
with Plan 9 or has used FUSE this is not THAT of a
revelation, but it is nice... making it possible to layer
translators (e.g. for accessing an iso on the ftp server)
makes it even a bit nicer.

Now i still had only the three DVDs as package sources, so,
thinking that it would be the most safe-ish option to first
upgrading everything to the 2023 release i followed an
article on the debian pages and added the following to my
sources.lst (after commenting out the DVDs):


%<-----------------------------------------------------

deb [check-valid-until=no trusted=yes] https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-ports/20230606T000000Z/ sid main

deb [check-valid-until=no trusted=yes] https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-ports/20230606T000000Z/ unreleased main

deb-src [check-valid-until=no trusted=yes]
https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20230606T000000Z/
sid main

%<-----------------------------------------------------

After that i ran an apt update, installed the
debian-archive-ports-keyring package, upgraded everything,
initiated a reboot while praying to the mighty GNU that it
will come up again.

It did. Everything worked fine.

So, now on the 2023 release, i thought that it would be nice
not being stuck on this

%<-----------------------------------------------------

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-ports unstable main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian unstable main
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-ports unreleased main

%<-----------------------------------------------------

And, again, i initiated an update followed by an upgrade.

Aaaand it broke the install. "I am idiot. Shoot me" to quote
an romanian friend of mine. Well, back to square one
then... now, knowing that it is possible to get a working
install, i downloaded the 2023 netinstall ISO and started
all over again.

The install from the netinstall media did go as planned
until i reached the point where it wanted me to select an
debian mirror, started to scan its content... and froze.

Ok, its unstable software, something like that may happen. I
rebooted, started the installation again and it did freeze
again.

Well... at this point i reached my frustration zenit, it was
already late so i somewhat rage-quitted for the day.

Ok, the next evening i was back at it again. THIS time the
installer was able to scan the mirror and finish the
installation. After the reboot it booted up normally... only
to freeze during boot. Okay, its still unfinished
software... hard-reset and another try. Just... something
during this failed boot attempt seemed to have messed up the
ext2 filesystem that bad that fsck could not repair it on
its own.

That was the last buckling of that bovine that threw me off
again. I needed a break, junior needed attention, and
just-too-many things at home needed my attention as an
handyman.

Addendum
---------

Another day, new luck... lets try it again. I thought to
myself: Well, you got a functional installed system out of
the 2021 version, so try it again with this approach. And
following my steps above up until after the upgrade to the
2023 version and... everything still works!

Now setting up X and an desktop environment was just a piece
of cake after that. Is this GNU now tamed? I don't think so,
but at least i got the reins of the bovine and now its
really time to explore this ecosystem.