Spork Bomb

So, the logo contest I started on the 16th is now over, voting has been done, and a winner has been selected. I present to you, created by thoughtcrime and fastfret79, the new official Arch Hurd logo!

Now the project has a website, developers, a proper logo… surely everything we need, right? Well, not quite. We still need packages, but wait, we have one! Ok, so it's the archhurd-artwork package containing all the logo submissions but it's still a package.

Regarding the current status of Arch Hurd, we don't have a native toolchain or pacman running on the Hurd yet. Allan and I have been writing build scripts for everything we need, though, so it shouldn't be too long before we can run pacman and/or compile stuff. As always, help is welcomed, check the Arch forum thread to see what we're up to and contribute a build script or two if you're feeling helpful.

Arch Hurd has hit a big milestone, it can be booted! We can all bask in microkernally, if not particularly Archy yet, goodness. Now we need to improve our bootable environment (it has no config files, /dev is empty, et cetera) and start work on a toolchain, autotools, pacman, and all the other things we need to build packages. Currently, it's a pretty useless system—but not for long :)

Building

Firstly we need to build Arch Hurd with Allan's crosshurd scripts:

mkdir hurd
wget http://repo.archhurd.org/crosshurd/crosshurd-20100116.tar.gz
tar xvf crosshurd-20100116.tar.gz

# You might need to edit ./scripts/prepare first.

source ./scripts/makeall

mkdir $HURD_DIR/servers
touch $HURD_DIR/servers/exec
mkdir $HURD_DIR/servers/socket

mkdir $HURD_DIR/tmp
chmod 1777 $HURD_DIR/tmp

Now you can either install to a partition or to a virtual hard disk for use with a virtualisation program such as qemu. GNU Mach doesn't support SATA drives yet, so I opted for qemu:

# Create the image
qemu-img create -f raw hurd.img 1GB

# Make and format partition
losetup /dev/loop0 hurd.img
fdisk /dev/loop0
losetup -d /dev/loop0
# partition should start at sector 63. Check with fdist -ul hurd.img
losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop0 hurd.img
mkfs.ext2 -b 4096 -I 128 -o hurd -F /dev/loop0

# mount image
mkdir $ROOT/mnt
mount -o loop /dev/loop0 /mnt

# Then, build hurd and copy to /mnt
cp -a /path/to/hurd /mnt

# Unmount
umount /mnt
losetup -d /dev/loop0

# Download a grub boot image
wget http://www.dolda2000.com/~fredrik/grub.img

# Note: Networking doesn't seem to work in qemu 0.12.1, downgrade to 0.11.1
qemu -boot a -fda grub.img -hda hurd.img -net nic,vlan=1 -net user,vlan=1

And now, you have a minimally bootable Hurd system.

After booting

I imagine one of the first things you'll notice is the complaint about the lack of /dev/console. So, let's set up some devices.

settrans -c /servers/socket/1 /hurd/pflocal
cd /dev
./MAKEDEV console null zero time hd0 hd0s1

And, you have no config files. Let's start to create those:

echo "/dev/hd0s1 / ext2 defaults 1 1" > /etc/fstab
echo "root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash" > /etc/passwd

If you opted for qemu, we can also set up the network at this point:

settrans -afgp /servers/socket/2 /hurd/pfinet -i eth0 -a 10.0.2.15 -g 10.0.2.2 -m 255.255.255.0
echo "nameserver 10.0.2.3" > /etc/resolv.conf

Extra Software

I have started writing build scripts for extra software, so first set the appropriate *_VER= lines in your ./scripts/prepare file:

SED_VER=4.2.1
NCURSES_VER=5.7
NANO_VER=2.2.1

sed

#!/bin/bash

cd $SOURCE_DIR
if [ ! -f sed-$SED_VER.tar.bz2 ]; then
  wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/sed/sed-$SED_VER.tar.bz2
fi

cd $BUILD_DIR
rm -rf sed-$SED_VER
tar -xf $SOURCE_DIR/sed-$SED_VER.tar.bz2

rm -rf sed-build
mkdir -p sed-build
cd sed-build

../sed-$SED_VER/configure \
  --host=$TARGET \
  --prefix=/usr
make DESTDIR=$HURD_DIR install

cd $ROOT

ncurses

#!/bin/bash

cd $SOURCE_DIR
if [ ! -f ncurses-$NCURSES_VER.tar.gz ]; then
  wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/ncurses/ncurses-$NCURSES_VER.tar.gz
fi

cd $BUILD_DIR
rm -rf ncurses-$NCURSES_VER
tar -xf $SOURCE_DIR/ncurses-$NCURSES_VER.tar.gz

rm -rf ncurses-build
mkdir -p ncurses-build
cd ncurses-build

../ncurses-$NCURSES_VER/configure \
  --host=$TARGET \
  --prefix=/usr \
  --mandir=/usr/share/man
  --with-shared \
  --with-normal \
  --without-debug \
  --without-ada \
  --enable-widec

make
make DESTDIR=$HURD_DIR install

cd $ROOT

nano

#!/bin/bash

cd $SOURCE_DIR
if [ ! -f nano-$NANO_VER.tar.gz ]; then
  wget http://www.nano-editor.org/dist/v2.2/nano-$NANO_VER.tar.gz
fi

cd $BUILD_DIR
rm -rf nano-$NANO_VER
tar -xf $SOURCE_DIR/nano-$NANO_VER.tar.gz

rm -rf nano-build
mkdir -p nano-build
cd nano-build

../nano-$NANO_VER/configure \
  --host=$TARGET \
  --prefix=/usr \
  --sysconfdir=/etc \
  --enable-color \
  --enable-nanorc \
  --enable-multibuffer \
  --disable-wrapping-as-root

make
make DESTDIR=$HURD_DIR install

cd $ROOT

This has already been covered by other bloggers but, as I did found the project (albeit accidentally), I think I'm justified in writing a post about it :)

The Arch Hurd Project is a crazy-sounding project of porting Archlinux to the GNU/Hurd platform so we can all, as Allan McRae put it, bask in microkernally goodness. We're currently working on building a good cross-compiler and cross-compiled system (most of the pieces are in place, it seems), after which we'll cross-compile pacman, autoconf/automake, make, et cetera until we can start packaging things up. The first release is likely to be a QEMU image.

So, what exactly makes an OS Arch-like? As Arch is what you make it, that's a rather difficult question to answer, I did, however, narrow it down to a few things which I think are truly important for any Arch system:

• Use of the pacman package manager.
• Some form of ABS tree.
• System-wide config file like /etc/rc.conf.
• i686 optimisation.

Currently the i686 optimisation is proving to be a pain: we're not sure if it's something we've done, or something else. Yet. Pacman will, obviously, have to wait until we can actually boot it first, the ABS tree is begun (as well as repositories), and I don't think anybody has even thought about an /etc/rc.conf file yet—though it shouldn't be too difficult to alter the Hurd initscripts to pluck data from a config file.

Other sites/blog posts you might find interesting:

Arch Hurd

The official Arch Hurd website

Parabola GNU/Linux

A project to provide an entirely free Archlinux

Arch Hurd?

Allan's post about Arch Hurd

A … “Hurd” work to do

Flamelab's post about Arch Hurd