Arch Hurd LiveCD: i686-core-2010-08-25.iso
It's been two months and twenty days since the last Arch Hurd LiveCD, and an update is definitely needed. The old LiveCD had, much to my embarrassment, a flaw in the "Install System" section that would make it impossible to install without manual intervention, and even then be a bit hit-and-miss for multi-partition set ups. In this new LiveCD, all known bugs have been eradicated, packages have been updated, and the whole thing just works better.
Changelog
- Updated installation packages - the livecd now features packages current as of today, 2010-08-25, and so less needs to be updated after installing.
- Updated LiveCD packages - the packages on the livecd itself have been updated, and as a result has become much more stable. This is most likely due to the recent GNU Mach / Hurd / glibc updates by Matthias. melpo, you rock.
- Updated and new documentation - the installation guide has been updated a little over the past few months, and so the latest version of that is on the livecd. Additionally, the livecd now features an introduction to translators written by Arne Babenhauserheide.
- Updated /arch/setup - this fixes all known bugs with the old setup script, I've tested it with a variety of different set ups, and it seems to work pretty well.
- Updated initscripts - In addition to all the changes melpo has made to the initscripts in the past two months, there has been a small change from how the old livecd used to work. In the old livecd, there was a 32MB ext2 image which was mounted in RAM and used as a temporary filesystem. Now, a temporary ext2 filesystem is created on the fly at boot; this enables the ISO to be just a little bit smaller.
New Arch Hurd mirror in the UK
We now have another mirror hosted in the UK - that makes two servers in the UK and two in Germany. This mirror is (currently) only available through HTTP. Mirrors outside Europe would also be awesome, so don't be shy :)
Many thanks to Positive Internet (their website is currently being re-done to be much nicer than what it is now, I'm told) for this latest mirror, and to the other two mirror providers.
Additionally, as you may have noticed, I have taken down the livecd from the Arch Hurd server, as we're getting very close to the bandwidth limit for this month. The livecd will return next month, and hopefully our bandwidth usage will remain low.
New Arch Hurd Mirror in Germany
Well, we've got another mirror already, this time hosted by Karsten Heiken on disposed.de.
The server is located in Germany (as is the Narf Hosting one), and is accessible via FTP and HTTP.
Arch Hurd Mirrors
The Arch Hurd LiveCD has been surprisingly popular, and we have (at the time of writing) consumed 80% of our monthly bandwidth quota for this month. I plan to release the next version of the LiveCD next month, and there's a real chance we'd go over the limit without mirrors. Thus, I am happy to announce that there is now an Arch Hurd LiveCD mirror (which may also become a package mirror in the future), hosted by Narf Hosting.
The hosting was negotiated by gtklocker. Thanks to Narf Hosting and gtklocker! :)
Now, if you try to download the LiveCD through the direct HTTP download, you get redirected to a random mirror (so files.archhurd.org and archhurd.narfhosting.com currently), to cut down our bandwidth usage. One mirror should be more than enough for the forseeable future, but if you want to provide some bandwidth, please contact me. Currently we only have packages on the main server, so a package mirror would be great.
We use rsync for our mirror-able content, so as long as you have some spare bandwidth and the ability to run rsync through cron, you too can be an Arch Hurd mirror. A full list of mirrors, which will be updated automatically, can be found on the new mirrors page.
Cool things to do with the Hurd: a read/write web
The credit for this idea goes to Arne Babenhauserheide, who submitted it to the bug-hurd mailing list. Basically, using a couple of Hurd translators (hostmux with httpfs, unionfs, and hgmerger), as well as a version control system (such as mercurial, git, or subversion), you can create a read/write version of the World Wide Web, in stark contrast to the mainly read-only one we have currently.
The full email can be seen in the bug-hurd archives.
The goal is to be able to make local edits of the world wide web and share those edits with others. We shall accomplish this using the translators hostmux with httpfs, unionfs, and hgmerger.
Now, using the hostmux translator, we can access websites at the path /http://..., this can be used to obtain the files to edit. On top of that, we shall use unionfs, to show our edited files in place over the original ones. For files in our local edit tree, all reads are directed to those, otherwise to the remote file. On top of that, we have hgmerger. hgmerger gets writes, merges them with the original files, and saves the changes to our local tree. Let's use this directory structure for reference:
/http://* - the real web
~/.http://* - the overlay
~/.bare-http://* - incoming changes.
When reading a site, hgmerger copies it from /http:// to ~/.bare-http and merges in to ~/.http://. In the case of a merge conflict, the original remote file will win. Our unionfs set up from earlier will ensure that the modified files are now seen when you request them through your browser, rather than the original files. This is getting pretty cool now.
Now, the repository in ~/.http:// can be shared online so other people can access your changes. And behold, a read/write web using the power of the Hurd and translators.
When I get my Hurd qemu image working again, I'll almost certainly be trying this and report back with my progress.
