A month of the Hurd: Thanks, Phil!, Debian Installer, compatibility, and LWN article.

Philip Charles, our 72 years old provider of Debian GNU/Hurd installation CDs has now resigned from that position. This has lead to a flood of public thank-you responses, and surely yet more of those have been sent privately. Phil, thanks again for providing the many installation images you've started producing nearly ten years ago! -- oh, the joy of (not) uploading CD-size images using a 56k modem... -- and that have been the first choice for many of us to get a Debian GNU/Hurd system installed.

On the other hand, there's no need to worry about these news: Jérémie Koenig got the Debian Installer for the Hurd into a basically working state; there is a simple four step installation guide. This brings us a big step forward towards easy installation of Debian GNU/Hurd and automated image creation. You can track Jérémie's progress on his user page.

Emilio Pozuelo Monfort also made progress with his Google Summer of Code work. For example, he posted a new iteration of his proposed changes to exec as well as he added support for sending file descriptors over Unix sockets. These patches add features and improve compatibility to other systems, and thus help to get more software packages to work as expected on GNU/Hurd systems.

Ludovic Courtès fixed make dist, which allows for easy tarball creation of the GNU Hurd sources.

We've been in the news last month -- and this month yet again: LWN posted a well-researched article on the status of the Hurd: Koen Vervloesem: The Hurd: GNU's quest for the perfect kernel.