Slashdot Mirror
Watch Out Linux, GNU Hurd Coming
sfcrazy writes "Debian now has concrete plans to bring GNU Hurd to the larger community. GNU Hurd is expected to be released with the release of Debian 7.0 Wheezy towards the end of 2012 or beginning of 2013. Debian maintainer Samuel Thibault has already produced a Debian GNU/Hurd CD Set with a graphic installer which is available to download."
Duke Nukem Forever actually gets released and now Hurd? Pinch me I must be dreaming!
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
Will be the year of the Hurd Desktop. 'Nuff said.
That's "Duke GNU/kem Forever" to you, sir!
- RMS
One of the very few people to put me on her Slashdot enemies list did so because I made a derogatory statement about the length of the HURD development process. In, as I recall, the year 2000 or 2001. It was a running joke at least five years before that.
Way to be timely and relevant, GNU.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
BSD userland on top of GNU Hurd.
"What the hell do you call an OS like that?"
"I'll call it 'The Aristocrats'"
--
BMO
Debian maintainer Samuel Thibault has already produced a Debian GNU/Hurd CD Set with a graphic installer which is available to download.
It speaks volumes that the highlight is the inclusion of a graphical installer. Likely no mouse support though....
Because I think an angry Stallman is a funny Stallman. So I Iook forward to this new Linux variant and I thank Linus Torvalds from the bottom of my heart. There would be no free software movement without you and you cannot be venerated enough. I wonder how Mr. Torvalds came up with Hurd? Oh wait, it is because he is a genius.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Who cares? I mean really... we have all the bases covered by Linux and BSD...
If you need a GPLv3 licensed OS for some reason, this will be one. Linux will probably never contain the patent guards Hurd will. That might be important for some folks.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
They have probably noticed the end of the world is December 21, 2012 and they hope it's true. That way no one will actually notice Hurd was postponed again ...
Nope. All I saw was an organization that maintains a distribution that is the basis for one of the fastest growing Linux distributions offer a distribution based on a kernel made by an organization that maintains one of the most used software compiler suites and userland tools. Please tell me where I should be looking. :P
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
"A" decade?
Here's what Linus Torvalds had to say about the GNU OS in 1992
"If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project: the fact is that it wasn't and still isn't. Linux wins heavily on points of being available now."
It has always been interesting for me to reflect on the HURD. The issue of mind share was crucial when comparing Linux and the HURD. Back in 1991 (or early 1992, maybe... can't remember that far back) I tried to contribute to the HURD. I had done some work on Mach in an OS course at school and was interested in playing more with it. But since I was pretty much a new grad and didn't have a proven track record working on OS kernels, the HURD team told me to take a hike. Well, they were polite about it, but were clear that they didn't want help from a nobody.
Linux was completely different. Linus may have blasted your code, but he accepted any and all help. This created mind share. For those who weren't around at the time, the whole idea of accepting work from any random joe off the street was a relatively new concept. The "Cathedral and the Bazaar" hadn't been coined by ESR yet and the normal way to do things in the free software world was to have one or two uber programmers hacking away, never seeing the light of day. Now everybody realises that a key indicator of success on a free software project is having an open and unobstructed development process.
The HURD has some good ideas, but their initial attitude killed them. Even though the team is very different now (from what I've hear, anyway -- lost interest in it more than a decade ago), there is really no chance of making a comeback, I think. Enticing eyeballs away from other projects will just be too difficult. Linus' biggest contribution to free software was *not* the Linux kernel, IMHO, but rather the development process that Linux used. He showed everyone how it should be done.
If that can actually be done safely and efficiently, it also means a non-free driver can't crash the kernel or fuck up other drivers. I would guess there are security implications as well.
Right now, a bug in the nVidia kernel driver on Linux could compromise the security of the entire machine, or crash the entire OS, or flip some bit in some other unconnected kernel system (or userland process), and it's hard enough to debug these things when you do have source code. So wanting an untainted kernel makes a lot of sense.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
This posting illustrates something very interesting: Why slashdot is irrelevant.
Any community that becomes so ingrained in the belief that it is superior is bound for failure. Because once you start believing no one can be better than you, you start to become complacent. The architecture on which HURD is based is technically superior to Linux. Whether this technical superiority translates to superiority in the marketplace is another issue entirely.
In my opinion the slashdot community consists of a lot of wannabes and not a whole lot of doers. Instead of criticizing and making fun of projects which are new or different why don't you embrace them and welcome them? This is one of the reasons I think the open source community has stagnated in recent years.
GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Why is it superior? Just because it's a microkernel?
Microkernels were the darling of OS research for almost the entirely of the 90's. But by the end of the 90's, most researchers had had enough. The alleged gains in configurability, reliability, security, and so on never materialized; but what never disappeared was the fact that they were stinking slow. Context switching is a fundamental limitation of such an architecture. And from what I've heard, a lot more complicated to program -- which leads to more programming errors and ugly performance hacks to compensate for any potential increase in reliability, security and so on they might have gained.
It's possible that Hurd has managed to overcome these limitations. But it has definitely earned its reputation of being slow and cumbersome; if that has changed, the burden of proof is on the Hurd community.
There are a few True Believers out there, still working on Hurd and Minix and L4 and the like, but they have yet to produce anything shown to be worth using.
I think the fact that Andrew Tanenbaum riduculed Linux in 1993 for being an "outdated architecture", when Minix just got paging working last year after 20 years of development, encapsulates my point completely.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.