People behind Debian: Samuel Thibault

[Posted April 19, 2012 by jake]

Raphaël Hertzog interviews Samuel Thibault about his work on accessibility and the Hurd. "The Debian GNU/Hurd port can almost completely be installed from the official mirrors, using the standard Debian Installer. Some patches need some polishing, but others are just waiting for being uploaded… Debian GNU/Hurd can start a graphical desktop and run office tools such as gnumeric, as well as the iceweasel graphical web browser, KDE applications thanks to Pino Toscano’s care, and GNOME application thanks to Emilio Pozuelo Monfort’s care. Of course, general textmode hacking with gcc/make/gdb/etc. just works smoothly. Thanks to recent work on ghc and ada by Svante Signell, the archive coverage has passed 76%."

People behind Debian: Samuel Thibault

Posted Apr 20, 2012 14:57 UTC (Fri) by Aissen (subscriber, #59976) [Link]

But… what about systemd on Debian GNU/Hurd ?

(Sorry, this had to be done ;-) )

People behind Debian: Samuel Thibault

Posted Apr 21, 2012 22:43 UTC (Sat) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (8 responses)

Note that that's 76% of a whole lotta software! I recently checked, out of idle curiousity, and a full Debian GNU/Linux system comes on eight DVDs! So The Hurd is now running more software than most distros ship with.

Of course, that doesn't matter if the packages you want don't run. And there's a corollary here: there's more software in Debian that doesn't run on The Hurd than most distros ship with. :)

So, they've come a lot farther than you might think just from hearing the percentages, but they've also got a lot farther to go than you might think from just hearing the percentages.

People behind Debian: Samuel Thibault

Posted Apr 22, 2012 16:46 UTC (Sun) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link] (7 responses)

The problem is not the list of available packages. The problem is the drastically reduced hardware compatibility.

People behind Debian: Samuel Thibault

Posted Apr 23, 2012 16:26 UTC (Mon) by sthibaul (✭ supporter ✭, #54477) [Link] (6 responses)

As in?

As mentioned in the interview, the Hurd can now use linux 2.6.32
network drivers. That pushes support way forward.

But yes, the latest graphic card is not supported.

Just like it would not have been supported by Linux some time ago.

So what?

People behind Debian: Samuel Thibault

Posted Apr 23, 2012 17:44 UTC (Mon) by nbourdau (subscriber, #68532) [Link] (5 responses)

Up to my knowledge, the Hurd is still lacking the support for USB which is nowadays quite harmful.

People behind Debian: Samuel Thibault

Posted Apr 23, 2012 17:55 UTC (Mon) by sthibaul (✭ supporter ✭, #54477) [Link] (4 responses)

That is missing indeed. I however doubt anybody would use a Hurd box for desktop use for now, anyway.

People behind Debian: Samuel Thibault

Posted Apr 24, 2012 8:16 UTC (Tue) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link] (3 responses)

> I however doubt anybody would use a Hurd box for desktop use for now, anyway.

So what would they be using it for? I struggle to imagine a sysadmin installing Hurd on a server.

People behind Debian: Samuel Thibault

Posted Apr 24, 2012 8:19 UTC (Tue) by sthibaul (✭ supporter ✭, #54477) [Link] (2 responses)

Not something that needs USB. There are still plenty of computers that have PS/2 ports, which will work fine.

I said "desktop use", not "desktop computer".

People behind Debian: Samuel Thibault

Posted Apr 24, 2012 16:51 UTC (Tue) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (1 responses)

It has been literally years since I saw the last new machine with a PS/2 port...

People behind Debian: Samuel Thibault

Posted Apr 24, 2012 16:55 UTC (Tue) by sthibaul (✭ supporter ✭, #54477) [Link]

So what? They still work.

Anyway, if you really want USB implemented, come implementing it.

If people cared only about hardware support, we wouldn't have Linux
nowadays.

People behind Debian: Samuel Thibault

Posted Apr 24, 2012 8:28 UTC (Tue) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

I hope they keep going and get to 99%! As grumpy as I can be, I like the dreamers, they keep things fun :)