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.

[[InstallationExperiences]]

Items 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 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