Arch Hurd
This has already been covered by other bloggers but, as I did found the project (albeit accidentally), I think I'm justified in writing a post about it :)
The Arch Hurd Project is a crazy-sounding project of porting Archlinux to the GNU/Hurd platform so we can all, as Allan McRae put it, bask in microkernally goodness. We're currently working on building a good cross-compiler and cross-compiled system (most of the pieces are in place, it seems), after which we'll cross-compile pacman, autoconf/automake, make, et cetera until we can start packaging things up. The first release is likely to be a QEMU image.
So, what exactly makes an OS Arch-like? As Arch is what you make it, that's a rather difficult question to answer, I did, however, narrow it down to a few things which I think are truly important for any Arch system:
- Use of the pacman package manager.
- Some form of ABS tree.
- System-wide config file like /etc/rc.conf.
- i686 optimisation.
Currently the i686 optimisation is proving to be a pain: we're not sure if it's something we've done, or something else. Yet. Pacman will, obviously, have to wait until we can actually boot it first, the ABS tree is begun (as well as repositories), and I don't think anybody has even thought about an /etc/rc.conf file yet—though it shouldn't be too difficult to alter the Hurd initscripts to pluck data from a config file.
Other sites/blog posts you might find interesting:
- Arch Hurd
- The official Arch Hurd website
- Parabola GNU/Linux
- A project to provide an entirely free Archlinux
- Arch Hurd?
- Allan's post about Arch Hurd
- A … “Hurd” work to do
- Flamelab's post about Arch Hurd
