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[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2008, 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc."]]
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[[!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, students might wish to look at the current Debian installer source and build process.
Possible mentors: Samuel Thibault (youpi)
Exercise: Fix a couple of Hurd issues in busybox.
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