What a Hurd release should be able to do for me

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 23:34:04 +0200

I thought a bit about what I’d need from Hurd to use it for some of my real life tasks.

My desktop has to be able to do everything it does now, and that under high load, so it currently is no useful target for the Hurd.

But then I have an OLPC XO sitting here, and I use it mostly for work and for clearly defined tasks. As such it seems natural to me to check, what the Hurd would have to be able to do to support my workflow on the OLPC.

What I need

Writing text and programming Python with emacs. - works.

Use Mercurial for my versiontracked stuff. - works.

Reading websites with emacs and w3m or with lynx. - works.

Use SSH to go on my desktop and on the university machine. - should work.

Run X11 with dwm and emacs. - should work.

Boot Hurd on the OLPC from a USB stick. - not yet?

Support networking over wlan and wpa_supplicant. - not yet? Might DDE kit help?

Listen to music with Quod Libet in X11. - not yet. Needs audio support.

What would be nice

Run a Gentoo system. - not really needed, but nice to update my system with the same tools.

Watch videos with mplayer. - unlikely. Even with Linux as kernel watching videos pushes my XO to the limit. But this is not essential.

So, as soon as Debian GNU/Hurd (or Arch Hurd) supports the things I need, I’ll put it on a USB-stick and use it for coding and writing.

To be frank: I’d likely even use it without audio-support. I have an mp3 player and can feed it via USB. So the essential features for me are:

Essential features

Writing text and programming Python with emacs. - works.

Use Mercurial for my versiontracked stuff. - works.

Use SSH to go on my desktop and on the university machine. - should work.

Boot Hurd on the OLPC from a USB stick. - not yet?

Support networking over wlan and wpa_supplicant. - not yet? Might DDE kit help?

Conclusion

The Hurd doesn’t yet do everything I need for my OLPC, but it isn’t that far away either. Grub already gets ported to OLPC, so what’s missing to make the Hurd a work system for me are just booting on OLPC from USB stick and wlan-support on OLPC.

All the rest I need for work is already in place.