Neal Walfield's [guide](http://web.walfield.org/papers/hurd-installation-guide/english/hurd-install-guide.html) is excellent and is available in several formats. This is the guide that the Hurd community always references first. To install under the Bochs x86 emulator, Alfred M Szmidt wrote a [great guide](http://ftp.walfield.org/pub/people/ams/hurd/creating_bochs_image_for_gnu.txt). The GNU official [installation page](http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/install.html) is the canonical reference.

On Sept 20, 2002 [[Main/DeepakGoel]] (a self-proclaimed newbie) posted a link to his personal [step-by-step installation](http://24.197.159.102/~deego/pub/hurd/install-guide/install.txt). The parent directory has additional material.

Ohers who wish to post summaries of their installation experiences are encouraged to do so. The installer methods, package dependencies and file locations frequently do change without warning.

Items of interest during install not mentioned elsewhere include:

* When preparing the hurd partition, you may wish to add a -b 4096 option to mkfs.ext2 (the default is chosen depending on the size of the partition, and the support for block size 1024 is buggy).

* fdisk is most commonly used under Debian GNU/Linux for creating partitions. fdisk/cfdisk will work just fine. Neal's guide chooses to recommend [GNU parted](http://www.gnu.org/software/parted) instead.

* **IMPORTANT!** Remember when first booting into your freshly un-tarred distribution, you must pass the `-s` option to `/boot/gnumach.gz`. Failure to do so means that you won't get single-user mode.

* **IMPORTANT2!** Add the --readonly flag to the file system server in your Grub menu.lst file. This is a work-around to get fsck working properly. Don't forget, everything must be on ONE line! Like this
  * module /hurd/ext2fs.static --readonly --multiboot-command-line=$\{kernel-command-line\} --host-priv-port=$\{host-port\} --device-master-port=$\{device-port\} --exec-server-task=$\{exec-task\} -T typed $\{root\} $(task-create) $(task-resume)

* The current (24 May 2002) system install image is once again in its proper location <code><ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/hurd/contrib/marcus/gnu-latest.tar.gz></code>. The old staging server image at <code><ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/hurd/debian-staging/></code> is now deprecated.

* a recommended `/etc/apt/sources.list`: <br /><code>deb <ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/hurd/debian> unstable main <br /> deb <ftp:/ftp.debian.org/debian> unstable main <br /> deb-src <ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian> unstable main</code>

* The default editor is now `nano`, not `ae`.

* Some packages like `libc6-dev` are old yet depended on by other packages not yet updated. In this particular case, I believe the new dependency is `libc0.3-dev`. However these dependencies may cause problems for apt. To circumvent these problems there are two general solutions.
  * The first is to change the dependencies that apt looks at in the `/var/lib/apt/lists/` directory. For example, you could modify libc0.3 to provide the missing `libc6-dev` package.
  * Installing the `equivs` package and creating a dummy package is the second alternative. This will satisfy the apt dependency in a cleaner manner.

* If you are following Neal's installation guide, he presents a sample `/etc/fstab`:

> # <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>  <dump>  <pass>
>     /dev/hd2s1      /               ext2    rw         0       1
>     /dev/hd2s2      /home           ext2    rw         0       2
>     /dev/hd2s3      none            swap    sw         0       0
>
> When you first boot, your
>
> `/home`
>
> directory will
>
> _not_
>
> be auto-mounted. You must set a passive translator on that node to access that partition. The correct syntax for this is:
>
> <br />
>
> `settrans -p /home /hurd/ext2fs /dev/hd2s2`

* After you install, you'll want to do several _important_ things:
  * Run `passwd` to give the root user a password. By default, root does not have one.
  * Run `adduser` to give yourself a user account. _Do not_ use root indiscriminately.
  * Since the Hurd does not use `ld.so.conf`, you will want to specify where the X Window System keeps its libraries. Do this by adding the following line to your `/etc/profile`: <br />`export LD_LIBRARY_PATH='/lib:/usr/X11R6/lib'`
  * Bring your system up to par by running: `apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade`

* Install these extremely useful packages
  * `libstdc++4` -- Some packages require version 4 and assume that it will be installed as part of the standard configuration.
  * `dialog` -- Debconf uses this for pretty text display.
  * `libterm-readline-gnu-perl` -- _Ibid_.
  * `screen` -- A terminal multiplexer that is important because the Hurd does not yet have virtual consoles.

* There are some extremely useful 'apt' tricks that can be used to get packages when using Debian GNU/Linux (possibly others) for installation on the Hurd. The steps are covered in the file /usr/share/doc/apt/offline\* which has been used by several Hurd developers successfully.

* Edit your `/etc/inetd.conf` and comment out all the services you don't need. Services that probably don't need to be running are `ftp`, `telnet`, `shell`, `login`, and `exec`.

-- [[Main/SimonLaw]] - 29 May 2002