Merge branch 'master' into external_pager_mechanism

Conflicts:
	microkernel/mach/external_pager_mechanism.mdwn

1 files changed, 41 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/community/gsoc/project_ideas/debian_installer.mdwn b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/debian_installer.mdwn
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..43682e8b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/debian_installer.mdwn
@@ -0,0 +1,41 @@
+[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2008, 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc."]]
+
+[[!meta license="""[[!toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[!toggleable
+id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
+document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
+any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
+Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license
+is included in the section entitled
+[[GNU Free Documentation License|/fdl]]."]]"""]]
+
+[[!meta title="Port the Debian Installer to the Hurd"]]
+
+The primary means of distributing the Hurd is through Debian GNU/Hurd.
+However, the installation CDs presently use an ancient, non-native installer.
+The situation could be much improved by making sure that the newer *Debian
+Installer* works on the Hurd.
+
+Some preliminary work has been done, see
+<http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Hurd>.
+
+The goal is to have the Debian Installer fully working on the Hurd.  It
+requires relatively little Hurd-specific knowledge.
+
+A lot of the "non-Linux support" part of the project has already been done thanks to a previous GSoC, so at least no ground reason should bar the project. A lot of the required udebs are already in Debian or are pending upload, so that building an image and booting it does already work. A preliminary list of what remains is
+
+ * Add initrd support to GNU Mach, unless youpi does it before :) This should not be very complicated by re-using the iopl driver code.
+ * hurdify genext2fs to handle 4096 block size by default (see bug #562999) and support translator entries.
+ * Port busybox. This needs to be synchronized with kfreebsd people, who have probably already done some work, but that seemingly still hasn't been merged. In the meanwhile, youpi has a version with most of it disabled so a d-i image can actually be built.
+ * Port keyboard-setup to configure the xkb driver of the Hurd console
+
+As a starting point to get a grasp at how the debian installer is built, students might wish to look at the current Debian installer source and build process on Linux:
+
+ * svn co svn://svn.debian.org/d-i/trunk/installer/
+ * cd installer/build
+ * make build_monolithic
+
+The same can be done on hurd-i386 but a few non-uploaded packages are needed, see http://people.debian.org/~sthibault/hurd-i386/README-d-i
+
+Possible mentors: Samuel Thibault (youpi)
+
+Exercise: Fix a couple of Hurd issues in busybox.