[jwhat]

Hi SGI'ers, Unix'ers & GNU'ers,

in looking at SGI/BSD status, I took a tangent and decided to give GNU Hurd a go..

There is a Debian/Hurd distribution that allows you to do a virtual install on KVM.

This only runs on now old i440FX / BIOS VM which has emulated IDE HD/CDROM (obsolete HW).

In doing some historical digging I came across these quotes from Thomas Bushnell (initial Hurd architect/developer):

- RMS was a very strong believer -- wrongly, I think -- in a very greedy-algorithm approach to code reuse issues. My first choice was to take the BSD 4.4-Lite release and make a kernel. I knew the code, I knew how to do it. It is now perfectly obvious to me that this would have succeeded splendidly and the world would be a very different place today.
- RMS wanted to work together with people from Berkeley on such an effort. Some of them were interested, but some seem to have been deliberately dragging their feet: and the reason now seems to be that they had the goal of spinning off BSDI. A GNU based on 4.4-Lite would undercut BSDI.
- So RMS said to himself, "Mach is a working kernel, 4.4-Lite is only partial, we will go with Mach." It was a decision which I strongly opposed. But ultimately it was not my decision to make, and I made the best go I could at working with Mach and doing something new from that standpoint.
- This was all way before Linux; we're talking 1991 or so.

So here we are and Hurd is still plugging away to provide the last piece of the GNU puzzle.

As part of reading I come across a statement that GNU/Hurd will be looking to release 64 Bit Mach Kernel which will then have both 32 & 64 bit BSD servers sitting on top of them.

Kind of fun to read the history.

On my Debian/Hurd install I can only get CLI interface going as X11 does not start for some reason, so need to do more tinkering on the configuration.

Cheers from Oz,


jwhat/John