Debian Installer questions Re: Debian GNU/Hurd installation

[Svante Signell]

On Wed, 2010-10-20 at 14:25 +0200, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> There were some reports that the d-i image on
> http://jk.fr.eu.org/debian/hurd-installer/
> was hanging/erroring during grub configuration.  This is now solved: the
> problem was simply newer grub/parted packages on the official debian
> mirrors, which were overriding the patched version of Jeremie.  I have
> uploaded to debian-ports newer patched versions, so it's back working
> again, and I've disabled autobuild of grub and parted to make sure it
> doesn't break again unexpectedly :)

I have a few questions about the Debian GNU/Hurd Installer:

- Is it still maintained, latest development was made by Jeremie Koenig,
in august 2010, right. He is no longer active as a developer?

- Looks like Samuel made the installer work again with patched
grub/parted, as well as committed the Debian Installer (D-I) patches by
Jeremie?

- The installer, contained in mini.iso has not been updated since August
17. Are there any plans to make the Debian GNU/Hurd installer up to date
with the Debian GNU/Linux Installer, now at beta1, probably not? What
about the installer status for other OSes, like *BSD?
 
- The other files at the web address above, seems to be part of the
contents of mini,iso: boot/initrd.gz, boot/kernel/{ext2fs.static,
gnumach.gz, ld.so.1}?

- I have some comment on the installer defaults, like for a 4.3 GB qemu
file, 4 GB goes into the / partition and only 224 Meg into the swap
area, even with a memory parameter of 1G passed to qemu. I tried to
change the defaults but had problems to create a first partition of 3.5
GB at / and a logical 0.7G partition for swap. Also toggling the boot
parameter did not work. Do somebody care about comments?

- Looks like the mirror files at .../hurd-installer/mirror are still
updated. From where are they mirrored?

BTW: I'll write up a short story how to install GNU/Hurd starting from
the D-I image mini.iso up to a running X (in addition to Jeremies
README.txt) with qemu and qemu-kvm if somebody is interested. Please let
me know. In my opinion kemu-kvm is very usable on computers with
hardware virtualization support, VT-X and AMD-V. Otherwise, maybe Xen or
Virtualbox are better alternatives (will try Xen next).
 
Thanks,
Svante