Fsf-friends February 2005

fsf-friends@gnu.org.in

35 participants
66 discussions

Re: [Fsf-friends] Kerala government to use free software in schools
by CK Raju 18 Feb '05

18 Feb '05

Nuaiman is available at nuaiman(a)journalist.com Raju --- CK Raju <ckraju(a)linuxtimes.net> wrote: We should also thank Nuaiman who wrote the damning piece in Madhayamam Weekly that provoked the KSTA. CK Raju --- "V. Sasi Kumar" <sasi.cess(a)gmail.com> wrote: We should thank the Kerala School Teachers Association for its efforts in this matter. _____________________________________________________________ LinuxTimes.Net --> An Online Linux Magazine _______________________________________________ Fsf-friends mailing list Fsf-friends(a)mm.gnu.org.in http://mm.gnu.org.in/mailman/listinfo/fsf-friends _____________________________________________________________ LinuxTimes.Net --> An Online Linux Magazine

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[Fsf-friends] FSF India activities in TN between 5th and 8th Feb 2005
by Ramanraj K 18 Feb '05

18 Feb '05

A short summary of the FSF India activities that took place in TN between 5th and 8th Feb 2005 is posted at: http://gnowledge.org/pipermail/fsf-tn/2005-February/000051.html

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RMS on Bill Gates Intellectual property views
by Keshav V 17 Feb '05

17 Feb '05

This article by RMS in published in ZDNET : http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9593_22-5578632.html thanks Keshav ________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your life partner online Go to: http://yahoo.shaadi.com/india-matrimony

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Re: Re: [Fsf-friends] Fwd: [mramadoss@techserve.co.in: Can u guide to a GNU laptop]
by Kanti Jadia 17 Feb '05

17 Feb '05

Seeing this thread am unable to follow what we are talking about. Maybe we need a new thread. chao Kanti On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 Joe Steeve wrote : >Raj Mathur <raju(a)linux-delhi.org> writes: > > I wonder how useful it is to make Hurd T-shirts? > >I dont know., but maybe because of my constant talking ;-) of the >Hurd., there is some eagerness among people in my college to try >the Hurd. > >-- >.O. A proud GNU user >..O http://www.joesteeve.tk/ >OOO http://joe.bsdnerds.org/ >_______________________________________________ >Fsf-friends mailing list >Fsf-friends(a)mm.gnu.org.in >http://mm.gnu.org.in/mailman/listinfo/fsf-friends ----------------------------------------- Enjoy your Freedom,use GNU/Linux. http://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html -----------------------------------------

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Re: [Fsf-friends] Kerala government to use free software in schools
by CK Raju 17 Feb '05

17 Feb '05

We should also thank Nuaiman who wrote the damning piece in Madhayamam Weekly that provoked the KSTA. CK Raju --- "V. Sasi Kumar" <sasi.cess(a)gmail.com> wrote: We should thank the Kerala School Teachers Association for its efforts in this matter. _____________________________________________________________ LinuxTimes.Net --> An Online Linux Magazine

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Interview: Tony Mobily, Free Software Magazine
by Frederick Noronha (FN) 16 Feb '05

16 Feb '05

Download this magazine from freesoftwaremagazine.com http://entertainment.newsforge.com/entertainment/05/01/27/1829208.shtml?tid… Interview: Tony Mobily, Free Software Magazine Tuesday February 15, 2005 (08:00 AM GMT) By: Aaron Klemm Free Software Magazine launched last month in electronic format, with a print version due in April. Free Software has no central office, and is not funded by any venture capitalists with deep pockets. Article topics range from an analysis of XML to a discussion about intellectual freedom. Segments of Richard Stallman's blog are promised as a regular feature. A section of technically-oriented articles covers password management, LiveCDs, and programming free software on Mac OS X. The final section deals with economic, social, and political issues of free software. We spoke with editor-in-chief Tony Mobily about creating FSM and his goals for the magazine. Congratulations on the launch of Free Software Magazine. Who do you see as your target audience? Identifying FSM's audience is a little bit tricky. Free software is not a specific product; for example, both Apache and Firefox are free software, but they are very different in many respects. The common ground for FSM's readers is their love of free software and of freedom in general. The magazine is a good way of reinforcing our movement's beliefs, and of creating awareness that the freedom we have at the moment might be taken away if we don't fight for it. It is also a way of discovering what you can do with free software from a technical point of view. The magazine also targets all those people who confuse free software with "shareware" or "freeware." Sadly, that still happens a lot. FSM is a "free software" magazine. Does the "open source" ideology have a place at FSM? Using Richard Stallman's own words, "The Free Software movement and the Open Source movement are like two political camps within the free software community". In general, FSM leans towards the Free Software movement, which, I feel, gives more recognition to GNU (which, let's remember, started it all) and emphasize the importance of freedom. This is why the magazine is not just about free software, but also about freedom. The Open Source ideology does have a place in FSM, for sure: we are fighting the same war, but in different camps, and in different ways! What are the key features of your business plan? Is FSM a completely bootstrapped venture? Yes -- in fact, we are pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps as we speak. :-) The business plan is based on an assumption that would probably only work in the free software world: that subscribers are willing to pay a higher subscription for a magazine that is: # Of a very high standard. # Central to our community. # Aimed at paying authors good money for free contents (we are not at this point yet). # Willing to donate ads to free software companies. Other magazines cost much less than ours -- we charge $6.95. But our aim is different. We are not here to make millions. We simply want to give free software an authoritative voice people can refer to and quote. You have offered reduced-price and even free advertising to companies that support free software. Are you concerned that will place too high a burden on subscribers? No, because we will hopefully have plenty of paying advertisers. As soon as that happens, we will reduce the price of the magazine. Since delivering a free-as-in-beer printed magazine to subscribers isn't feasible, do you see a lesson in the FSM sales model for software developers? To be honest the short answer is no. I think writing software and writing magazines (and documentation in general) are very different things. FSM's model is basically "subscribers get the newest magazine, non-subscribers get six-week-old issues." This works because the delay is not great. Applying this principle to software doesn't really work. There are security bugs to be fixed, patches to be accepted, and so on. What I do think, though, is that this model should be followed by other magazines and publications. I worked in the magazine industry in Europe for five years. The amount of wonderful articles locked away forever is just not acceptable. Making articles accessible on a Web site for free (as in beer) is not enough. Contents need to be free -- under the GNU Free Documentation License, a Creative Commons license, or simply a verbatim-copying-only license. That's the only way to ensure that contents will stay alive forever -- or at least as long as at least one person wants them published. In Issue 1 of FSM, you describe the technical work involved in creating the magazine. Were there unique technical problems using completely Free Software to create the first issue? First of all, a disclaimer: our system is based nearly entirely on free software. Unfortunately, there is still one critical component [a VBA script for manipulating RTF files] which needs non-free software to run. We are planning to fix that soon. As far as unique technical problems, I must say that, if anything, thanks to free software we managed to save phenomenal amounts of time (and therefore money). I am not talking about license fees here. I am talking about the fact that we generate the magazine's PDF automatically. There is no composition involved! We achieved this thanks to LaTeX and Gianluca Pignalberi, a LaTeX guru and university lecturer who decided to invest vast amounts of his time in this project. With FSM, the PDF is generated directly from the tex file, which is generated from the XML. Gianluca has to check that nothing went wrong with the conversion, but mistakes are getting less and less frequent -- and once they are fixed, they won't show up ever again! You use GIF files on the FSM website and JPEG files in the print version of FSM. Are there plans to use the W3C-endorsed PNG file format, which has no history of patent problems? GIF was a choice that happened nearly by accident. In fact, it was thoughtlessness on my side. Now, many automatic scripts are based on the assumption that we have GIF files there. JPEG was used for a similar reason. We are looking into converting all the images to PNG, but it will take time. It's a typical example of the mistakes you can make when you start fresh, even if you are a freedom advocate. There are a million things to do, and by the end of the month you've made one or two mistakes which you really shouldn't have made, and that will take quite some time to fix. Is it difficult to find authors who want to write about free software and related issues? Finding good authors in any field is not easy. Finding reliable authors is very hard. Finding good, reliable authors who are willing to write for free (even as a temporary arrangement) can be really quite tricky! Again, I was amazed by the number of amazing authors I found right at the beginning of this adventure. I am talking about people who write articles which make a difference, change people's minds, or explain something in the most brilliant way. How will you ensure the quality of the articles remains high? Some authors will hand in an article, and you think, "If every author were like this, I wouldn't need editors." But they are the exceptions. Several authors need [three or four] steps in the editing cycle. Some of the published articles have been edited really heavily, changed, improved, discussed. I believe that's what makes the difference. A magazine is not a blog: each article needs to be sharp, well-edited, aimed at a specific audience. That's a lot of work and we are willing to do it. What are your plans for compensating authors? We can pay authors when we have at least 1,300 subscribers and a few paying advertisers. We are working on both these things. I believe we will be able to pay authors from issue 5 onwards, but it could be a little later (if no ads are sold, and subscriptions are slow), as it could be a little earlier (if people buy ads, and subscriptions are going OK). Not paying authors really, really bothers me. I will never, ever say "your payment is the honour of writing for us and be published." I don't think that's the way you run a business. I will pay authors before I pay myself -- that's a promise. How does the future look for FSM? What are your long-term goals for the magazine? Right now, the future of Free Software magazine depends on its subscribers, and subscriptions are coming. We need about 300 subscribers by March 12 not to lose money, and we are slowly but steadily getting there. The long-term goal? Well, I have several. The primary goal is to turn Free Software Magazine into the most important magazine in the free software world. I want it to become the authoritative voice of our movement, a publication that everybody in the IT world knows and respects. I would also love to be able to drop the subscription prices, which at the moment are far too high. We will be able to do that as soon as we get more subscribers and advertising. How can people subscribe and what is the subscription price? There are several options. You can pay by credit card (monthly, six monthly or yearly) or by (American) cheque. The magazine costs US$6.95 per issue; at the moment, that just covers the printing costs and the postage. When we print more magazines, the printing costs will go down and we will be able to charge less for FSM. In the meantime, we ask the members of our community to subscribe, support us and join us in this adventure. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Frederick Noronha (FN) Nr Convent Saligao 403511 GoaIndia Freelance Journalist P: 832-2409490 M: 9822122436 http://fn.swiki.net http://fn-floss.notlong.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation. --Aristotle

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Re: Swatantra - The cluster demo went gr8
by Anand Babu 16 Feb '05

16 Feb '05

,----[ Javed Rahman <s.kaniff(a)gmail.com> ] | Hi anand, | Javed here.. Remember me??? i called u to check out my cluster here | at Swatantra.. The demo went great.. Thanx for ur help.. The Ganglia | test seemed to satisfy everyone.. Remember that Debian machine i | told you about?? The one we couldnt get the x server running.. Can | u send me some documentation on how to install and run the x server | on debian.. i tried searching the internet but couldnt find | anything.. | Thanx... | Javed `---- Hi Javeed, Sorry, I am still trying to catch up with my huge email backlog. I choosing emails randomly and replying. I am glad to hear that your Cluster demo went well. There are many ways to configure XFree86 under Debian GNU/Linux. Before you start X configuration, do this to make hardware probing smooth. # apt-get install mdetect read-edid discover ------------------------------------------------------------------- Easiest method is dpkg-reconfigure approach # dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Or xf86cfg method # xf86cfg # cp XF86Config /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 # ln -sf /dev/psaux /dev/mouse I usually edit the screen section by hand to look like this Section "Screen" Identifier "Default Screen" Device "Generic Video Card" Monitor "Generic Monitor" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Depth 24 Modes "1024x768" EndSubSection EndSection ------------------------------------------------------------------- If nothing works, lspci will tell you what VGA card you have. Post me the output of 'lspci -v'. Newer Debian Sarge installers does a fairly good job in detecting hardware. -- Anand Babu Free as in Freedom <www.gnu.org>

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Re: Reg ur talk at IITM -- with attachment
by Anand Babu 16 Feb '05

16 Feb '05

,----[ "Toufeeq Hussain" <Toufeeq_Hussain(a)infosys.com> ] | | > As I promised, you can download a copy of my presentation and | > example code at | > | > http://www.gnu-india.org/gnu/Hacking-GNU.pdf | > http://www.gnu-india.org/gnu/Hacking-GNU.sxi | > http://www.gnu-india.org/gnu/data-server.tgz | > | > OK, here is a slightly revised version of your minutes | > (actually documentation :) | > ============================================================== | > ========== | > Hacking GNU/HURD | > ================ | > as a part of GLV@ILUGC | | | I consider this an excellent guide to GNU/HURD. Riyaz, AB , is | permission given to upload the slides and the work done by Riyaz to | Infosys Linux Users Group ? | | Many new hackers interested in GNU/HURD will find this helpful. | | Regards, | Toufeeq Hussain `---- Riyaz has already published the document under GNU FDL 1.2 license. Slides are under the same license and example code under GNU GPL V2 or later. So please share them. Slides contain only bullet points with hardly any explanation. I hope you can now give talks using these slides and motivate more people towards GNU/Hurd hacking. http://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/mach/public/doc/osf/ http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/sd96/goel.html http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/docs.html http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/gnumach-docs.html Still the best document to start with is kernel_principles.ps under first the first link. -- Anand Babu Free as in Freedom <www.gnu.org>

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Re: [Fsf-friends] Backlash for Micro$oft
by CK Raju 16 Feb '05

16 Feb '05

Sandip, Nuaiman's article was in Malayalam. If you want to contact him, I can forward his telephone (Kerala) number. Nuaiman does have an e-mail id, but uses it from a cafe. CK Raju --- Sandip Bhattacharya <sandip(a)lug-delhi.org> wrote: From: Sandip Bhattacharya <sandip(a)lug-delhi.org> Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 10:10:30 +0530 To: ckraju(a)linuxtimes.net, Principal Support List of FSF-India <fsf-friends(a)mm.gnu.org.in> Subject: Re: [Fsf-friends] Backlash for Micro$oft On Mon, 2005-02-14 at 20:30 -0800, CK Raju wrote: > Dear Ajay, > It has to be done and it needs to be fast. I can tell you the Kerala story. Here a free-lance journalist "Nuaiman" wrote a brilliant expose on the issue (about The Project Shiksha of Micro$oft) in a popular weekly magazine. That caught fire, and the teaching community revolted, who even went to the extent of boycotting exams. Nuaiman wrote about the "earn while you teach" theme of Intel/Microsoft and the "project shiksha". Is there any online reference to that story? - Sandip -- Sandip Bhattacharya * Puroga Technologies * sandip(a)puroga.com Work: http://www.puroga.com * Home/Blog: http://www.sandipb.net/blog PGP/GPG Signature: 51A4 6C57 4BC6 8C82 6A65 AE78 B1A1 2280 A129 0FF3 _____________________________________________________________ LinuxTimes.Net --> An Online Linux Magazine

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Re: Reg ur talk at IITM -- with attachment
by Anand Babu 15 Feb '05

15 Feb '05

,----[ "Mohammed Riyaz" <p_mdriyaz(a)fastmail.fm> ] | Hi, | | I have written this document of what you spoke in IIT. I am | attaching a copy of it. This document will be put on the ilugc | websever. So if you do not like any part of it or want something | changed, let me know. | | Thank you, | Mohammed Riyaz P. | | P.S: it was a great session. :) `---- As I promised, you can download a copy of my presentation and example code at http://www.gnu-india.org/gnu/Hacking-GNU.pdf http://www.gnu-india.org/gnu/Hacking-GNU.sxi http://www.gnu-india.org/gnu/data-server.tgz OK, here is a slightly revised version of your minutes (actually documentation :) ======================================================================== Hacking GNU/HURD ================ as a part of GLV@ILUGC Speaker: Anand Babu Email: ab (at) gnu.org.in Date: 05 FEB 2005 Location: csd 320, Tenet seminar hall, IITM. For all those who couldn't make it, you did miss a lot. Cheer up though, i will try my best to bridge that gap. Brief Introduction: ------------------- The Hurd is a collection of servers that run on the Mach micro kernel to implement file systems, network protocols, file access control, and other features that are implemented by the monolithic Unix kernel or similar kernels (such as Linux). GNU Mach 1.x was derived from CMU Mach 3. There is also GNU Mach 2.0 branch based on Oskit from Utah (Oskit has Mach 4 code). initially developed from MACH 3. L4 (another micro kernel) is currently being developed and GNU Hurd hasn't booted off L4 yet. With L4 lacking the basic framework, AB recommended hacking GNU MACH over L4. Moreover getting a working GNU Hurd can be much faster with GNU MACH as most of the ground work has already been done. What GNU Hurd lacks as of now is mainly device drivers support and performance optimization. AB also emphasized on the need to get GNU Hurd working (it already works fine, i mean up to industry standard) in at least two years, in order to get in par with Linux kernel ;) SNIP: L4 tasks manages their resource themselves unlike Linux kernel. Though named micro kernel, they agent necessarily small in size. GNU Mach is big because of the Linux device drivers in it (more about this later). Drivers in User Space Vs Drivers in Kernel Space: ------------------------------------------------- AB spoke about the possibility of running device drivers in user space unlike Linus kernel where device drivers run in kernel space. Though he recommends hacking drivers in kernel space to get them ready initially. Mach tasks communicate over IPC and the advantages of user-space kernel surpasses the over-head of abstraction, Although performance doesn't suffer that much. Reason being IPC is essentially an abstraction with "mach_mesg" system call interrupt at the heart. (They are not like packets transferred between two socket applications). If the device drivers are made to run in user space, gdb could be run on the device driver to debug it. SNIP: L4 doesn't copy/queue the messages and is totally synchronous. In L4 the designers are planning to use User space drivers. Micro kernel Vs Monolithic Kernel: --------------------------------- No it wasn't a flame war ;)!! Though Linus calls Linux modular, it isn't actually modular because at run time the kernel runs as one big program( it is called modular because of the modules aspect of Linux). The disadvantage of this being, as the kernel gets bigger it is going to be more difficult to maintain it. On the other hand, the micro kernel as such is small. The modules are in user space, and are separate programs in its own space, which helps in maintaining them. Important concepts discussed about MACH: ---------------------------------------- -Threads -Tasks -Ports -Message & Message queue. Threads and tasks are exactly what we think they are. A task is like a container of threads, ports rights... The new and interesting things were ports, messages and message passing. Threads are the basic unit of execution. Task can have one or more threads. How ever Task are not like Unix processes. They do not have pid, gid ... Ports: ****** Unlike the ports we are familiar with, ports in MACH are the portals through which different tasks communicate with each other. The messages to different tasks are sent and received through ports. Ports are message queues with some properties associated to it (like message count). Port rights: ************ These rights which decide whether you can send/receive messages to/from a task(through the port) or not. Different rights: Send right - right to send to a port. Receive right - right to receive messages from a port. Send once right - this right is revoked after being used once. Port Set - Collection of receive rights. Similar to Linux file descriptors for a program that cannot be used by another program, the ports of task are protected by the kernel. The port rights are transferred through messages. Though the tasks can decide on the rights, it is the kernel which actually does the transfer of rights. Port Names pace: *************** Port Names pace is a structure maintained by the kernel for each task which contains the different rights. Each of the send once rights have a unique entry in the names pace and hence have a unique port name(discussed below). Similarly each of the receive right has a unique port name. Each port-set will have a unique port name. Send rights and receive rights to same ports have same port name. Remember a receive right cannot exist inside a port set and out-side as well. Port Name: ********** They appear as numbers like file descriptors. Port names are an index of port-rights into the port name space. Port Set: ********* Port set was released with CMU Mach 3. It is a collection of receive rights for a task. You can let the kernel listen on the entire range of receive-rights in a port-set and notify the task when ever message is ready. (Similar to "select" system call). Messages: ********* Messages consist of a mach message header, and data part. The data part in turn has data type field, count field and a data field. eg. data type - ins count - 10 data - 0..9 as guessed an array of 10 int's. :) How ports are handled in MACH? ------------------------------ In GNU Mach for a task to communicate with another task, it has to be done through ports. More precisely, it needs to have send rights to the other port. So when a task is created in MACH, the kernel creates port called task port (similarly thread port for threads) and the send rights for that port are placed in the task's task structure. Similarly two other ports are created, namely bootstrap port and exception port. The task in turn calls a routine mask_task_self(), which provides the send rights to the task port. Other basic requirements for a task such as contacting the file system server(more about servers later) are taken care of by inheriting the environment ports, which are created during GNU Hurd initialization. SNIP: Look at task.c and ipp_tt.c Line 86 of ipp_tt.c deals with the above paragraph. MiG: ---- MiG is the Mach 3.0 interface generator, as maintained by the GNU Hurd developers for the GNU project. The interface generator produces stub code from interface definition (.defs) files. The stub code makes it easy to implement and use Mach interfaces as remote procedure calls (RPC). Generally a .defs file is written which contains the functions to be implemented and is compiled with MIG. The output is two files, a server part and client part. The server part contains the function prototype. The function definition's are to be filled in by the developer to suit his requirements. The client part contains the routines to call the functions implemented by the server. So the actually message passing part is implemented by MIG. REFER TO data-server.c and data-client.c example. The Requirement- Device Drivers: -------------------------------- Shantanu Goel took Linux (1.3.35) device drivers for block,SCSI, PCI and ISA and got it working with CMU Mach. Advantage being no changes were required for the device drivers source. The wrapper took care of initialization, kernel memory allocation, I/O blocking. Currently GNU Mach has 2.0, 2.2 drivers of Linux kernel. Now the requirement is to port the Linux 2.6 kernel device drivers to GNU Mach. The emulation will produce a performance drop of few microseconds. The GNU Hurd: ------------- Servers: ******** In The GNU Hurd you have servers, eg. filesystem server, authserver TCP/IP stack, block drivers...etc. Communication (IPC) interface is defined by the corresponding MIG .defs files. Each of these servers takes care of specialized tasks and as a whole implements a POSIX system. In future GNU Hurd will also support distributed model called "collectives". Translators: ************ Translators are hooks in the filesystem which in turn link to a task. eg. You already have ftpfs, httpfs file systems, where you can mount a remote FTP or HTTP server locally and run tar or grep on them. $settans /root/.mbox /hurd/pop3fs --server=mail.gnu.org --user=.... to mount a remote POP3 connection as a local mbox file. Once the translator is set you could use the normal file system commands like cat, ls , grep etc on /tmp/ftp and it will behave like a local file system. Similarly translators could be written for gzip, http ... the list ends with your creativity. A whole list of libraries are available for this (eg. libdiskfs libnetfs ..) Two type of translators: *Active translators - these are lost with reboot, and showtrans does not work on them. *Passive translators. CASE STUDY: ~~~~~~~~~~~ The famous /dev/null in Linux is implemented as a translator in HURD. If you run ps you can see /hurd/null running as a task. This is hooked to /dev/null as a translator. If you have understood all this, then you should be wondering how a task (which acts a translator) is able to understand cat, grep, ls ...because i too did and AB explained it beautifully which takes us to the next topic. POSIX implementation on HURD: ----------------------------- Welcome to real world!!! or rather How deep is the rabbit hole??..:) Before we get into this.. there is a function that needs to be discussed. dirlookup() This function returns send rights (read important concepts in Mach) to particular task. (similar to a DNS server which returns a ip for the url). The libc calls like open, read, write .. in turn run a dirlookup() to get the rights from the required server. eg. if there is a regular file /tmp/foo a open on this would request rights from the filesystem server, but if /tmp/foo is a translator linked with foobar the the rights would be returned for foobar. Now both the filesystem server and foobar will have to implement the same set of functions, eg. io_read, io_stat etc. How is this done is you might ask. Remember the .defs file ??(read MIG above) It is the developer who fills the function definition's (go back and read MIG once more if in doubt). so in foobar for io_read, i can do a socket connect, or anything i like. so when you run cat, you call open, which does a dirlookup and returns the send right(either to a translator task or a server) and then open in turn calls io_open, io_read.. on their server. and we already know how to write a translator!!! :).. even though you missed the meet. LUCK HUH!! :) Cool tool librpci: ------------------ I dont really remember much about this(my brain was supercharged by now 4.5 hrs of HURD :)), but this tool will allow you to do a whole lot of things like stealing the task port, recreating the errors. eg if a server seems buggy to you, you could take a dump, then run librpci with this dump, librpci will simulate the previous situation with the help of the dump file. This should recreate the errors making the debugging easier. Closing notes: -------------- If you have installed GNU/Hurd, sshd will not run because /dev/urandom is not yet implemented in HURD. So you could write a binary which returns some thing random (or the same thing every time :) ) and create a symlink to it as /dev/urandom. You will have a sshd running fine. Alright, so you didn't attend the meet or you attended it and slept through out, but at least you have read this document and come this far. That gives more meaning to my effort in typing this document. Thank you. Mohammed Riyaz P. (HAPPY HACKING :) (quoting RMS)) ============================================================================== Here is some more info, I wrote. Usually you take care of this after you finish the installation and login in for the first time. SWAP and CDROM --------------- Also don't forget to add SWAP entries in your /etc/fstab after installation completes. You need to create devices before you use them. If you have a swap partition say hd0s2 (hda2) and cdrom as hd2 (hdc), then # cd /dev # ./MAKEDEV hd0s2 # ./MAKEDEV hd2 and add these two lines to /etc/fstab /dev/hd0s2 none swap sw 0 0 /dev/hd2 /cdrom iso9660 ro 0 0 # swapon -a APT ---- If your network card works, add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list deb http://ftp.gnuab.org/debian unreleased main deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian unstable main Or if you have setup to use CDROM instead, do this deb file:/cdrom/debian unstable main contrib local non-US/main non-US/contrib NETWORK -------- Setup networking like this: (Choose IP addresses appropriately) # settrans -fgap /servers/socket/2 /hurd/pfinet -i eth0 \ -a 192.168.1.54 -g 192.168.1.1 -m 255.255.255.0 # echo "nameserver 202.54.15.1" >> /etc/resolv.conf # ping www.gnu.org SSH ---- ssh installation will fail, because of missing /dev/urandom. Before you proceed with ssh installation, temporarily create a symbolic link of some binary file in place of urandom. This is just a dirty hack.. # ln -s /bin/bash /dev/urandom CONSOLE -------- I am comfortable with "screen" package, except I re-map C-a prefix with Happy Hacking, -- Anand Babu Free as in Freedom <www.gnu.org>

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Fsf-friends February 2005