A month of the Hurd: Arch Hurd, updated Debian GNU/Hurd QEMU image, and GSoC students.

The Arch Hurd folks keep making good progress: their count of available packages keeps increasing, and one of their team reported the first instance of Arch Hurd running on real hardware (and uploaded a photo as evidence).

Of course, our Debian port is still progressing, too: 66% of all Debian packages are currently available for Debian GNU/Hurd.

Samuel Thibault's fix got included in libxcb1, so X.org again works out of the box using a simple startx.

Philip Charles extended his offerings with an updated GRUB USB stick for booting Debian GNU/Hurd.

Carl Fredrik Hammar proposed a patch to faciliate debugging the startup of misbehaving translators.

Mainly thanks to Jose Luis Alarcon Sanchez, we now have a new QEMU image. It can be run with a simple qemu -m 512 -hda debian-hurd-17042010-qemu.img.

Thomas Schwinge updated our glibc maintenance repository to a recent version, including a bunch of the patches from the Debian glibc package (and these are meant to eventually be submitted upstream). After a long break, he as well updated his toolchain cross-compilation script cross-gnu to the current source code packages, and added C++ support.

On to the Google Summer of Code 2010: we got three students working on the Hurd this year:

• Jérémie Koenig, mentored by Samuel Thibault, will be working on adapting the Debian Installer to produce working Debian GNU/Hurd installation images so we can easily offer up to date disc-sets. (Details.)

• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, mentored by Carl Fredrik Hammar (who was a GSoC student in 2007), will be working on a task that may be perceived as less exciting from the outside, but yet is extremely valuable: fixing compatibility problems exposed by projects' testsuites. (Details.) For starters, he already got a glibc patch accepted upstream.

• Karim Allah Ahmed, mentored by Sergio López, will be working on tuning the VM Subsystem in GNU/Hurd to bring the virtual memory management in Hurd/Mach up to date. (Details.)

We'd be happy to see YOU sign up on our mailing lists (bug-hurd and debian-hurd are the main lists), and contribute towards making the Hurd usable for everyone, as written down in our mission statement. Perhaps one of the unassigned projects (outside of the Google Summer of Code context) from our project ideas list is fit for you?