A month of the Hurd: Media Appearances, procfs, Arch Hurd.

Neal Walfield and Michael Bank have been doing presentations related to the GNU Hurd: from the GNU Hackers Meeting in the Hague you can watch the video of the presentation by Neal Walfield: GNU/Hurd: It's About Freedom (Or: Why you should care) where he details why we're still interested in working on the GNU Hurd, and there is another presentation (including video) by Michael Banck: Debian GNU/Hurd -- Past. Present. And Future? (slides) from DebConf10, including a very nice nod towards the main actors who are currently pushing the Hurd forward.

Jérémie Koenig wrapped up his Google Summer of Code project (Debian Installer) by posting his Hurd patches for installer/build as well as the patches used for hurd 20100802-1~jk7 to the debian-hurd mailing list. Most of them have been handled in the mean time, and we're still waiting for you to test his work by following his easy four-step instructions.

However, even though that this year's GSoC has come to an end, he didn't stop working: among other things, he has rewritten procfs and published his version just before the end of the month:

I have successfully tested it with most of the Linux procps utilities, as well as busybox and htop. It seems to be stable, not too slow, and it stays under 1.5M in resident size.

Testing it is as simple as this:

$ git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/hurd/procfs.git
$ cd procfs/
$ git checkout jkoenig/master
$ make
$ settrans -ca proc procfs --compatible
$ ls -l proc/

Thomas Schwinge added some more information to the web pages, notably a bunch of open issues reports, to have them registered in a generic place, and to facilitate coordination. If you're looking for a Hurd-related project to work on, go looking there! He also converted and merged some of the hurdextras CVS repositories into the hurd Git repositories and our incubator. All of this should make it easier for new contributors to join in.

The Arch Hurd guys have some news to share, too:

• They reported on their current status, as well as they released a new LiveCD image, and added a Planet Arch Hurd which aggregates the different Arch Hurd Blogs.

• The team packaged everything you need for the GHAMP solution stack.

• Their Diego Nieto Cid sent a patch series to bring console-driver-xkb up to date. This is a add-on to allow using X keymaps to configure the Hurd console for non-US keyboard layouts.

Finally, amongst other bug fixing and other development work by the usual suspects, we had a short review of what the current Hurd contributors still need to use a GNU/Hurd system for most of their day-to-day tasks. This may help to prioritize the development efforts.