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Diffstat (limited to 'community/gsoc/project_ideas/debian_installer.mdwn')
| -rw-r--r-- | community/gsoc/project_ideas/debian_installer.mdwn | 41 |
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. |