2010-04-22 - Michael Walker

Well, a lot has happened since the last news item, this could be considered a little overdue.

Firstly, Matthias Lanzinger (melpo) has ported the Arch Linux initscripts to Arch Hurd. There is just something amazing about seeing Hurd boot up with the familiar-looking boot output... Whilst not yet working perfectly due to missing things elsewhere in Arch Hurd, this is still a great achievement.

Secondly, an update to the Hurd allows ext2 partitions bigger than 2GB to be used. Obviously, this is of great use to everybody, especially packagers or others who work with a large amount of files.

Along with initscripts came multi-user mode by default. Multi-user mode allows some niceties, such as a VGA console, similar to virtual consoles in Linux. Additionally, with the inclusion of shadow in core, users can now have passwords and adding more users is simple.

Coming to the end of the to-write list; Arch Hurd now has over one hundred packages. Considering that there are only three developers currently, this is a huge achievement. But there doesn't need to be only three, you can contribute too! The Arch Hurd Wiki was started recently, and already has a fairly good installation guide with troubleshooting, sure to be useful for those trying to install Arch Hurd for the first time.

And finally, Alexander Preisinger (giselher) has managed to run Arch Hurd on his laptop. This is, as far as we're aware, the first use of Arch Hurd outside a VM, so this is definitely a huge milestone! A photo can be seen on his user page in the wiki.