Re: Some Hurd related thoughts from someone who has no right to talk

[Joshua Branson]

liberamenso10000@gmail.com writes:

> About contributions to Hurd, I like to help in desktop bugs. I found many 
> bugs or not implemented tasks, that I desire to solve.
>
> - Add support to other desktop manager than xdm: Currently, the only 
> functional DM is xdm. Lightdm is installed by default during
> Xfce installation, but don't runs. I would like to solve this.
>
> - Add support to change tty after xorg start: Currently, when you starts 
> xorg, you can't to return to tty, which causes many
> bizzarres situations, as close xorg... From xorg, or stop the DM from the DE 
> terminal emulator (it is so bizarre, and use to cause
> problems). I will like to solve this also.
>
> - Enable polkit support: when the DE starts, this don't have permissions to 
> shutdown the system from graphical environment. The
> most standard solution to this is to use polkit to allow actions to users. I 
> found that Hurd has polkit installed, but feels that
> It isn't used. May be interesting enable it.
>
> Other interesting thing can be recover the hard shutdown (shutdown machine, 
> not only the system), but It feels so difficult.

These would be some awesome bugs to fix!!!  

>
> My knowledge is so limited. I have experience with bash scripting and 
> GNU/Linux administration. I have also knowledge of C++ and
> basic C. In classroom I learn a bit about POSIX process management, with 
> fork(), execl(), fifos, pipes and message queue. But I
> never touched the deep of a OS.
>
> Now I'm searching a Pentium 4 computer to try Hurd installation in real 
> machine. Previously I got a successfully installation in a
> 2000's AMD computer, but this PC is so slow to run the DE correctly.

I would actually recommend that you just run the Hurd in qemu.  Most, if
not all, of the main Hurd developers just run the Hurd inside qemu.

Also a cool idea!  I believe I read somewhere that it possible to have
the Hurd running in qemu, but make the X server run in Linux.  This is
apparently a really stable way to run the Hurd.

Also, maybe you and I could try to start up a GNU/Hurd hangout session.
Kind of like the Emacs hangouts.

>
> If you are in Facebook's GNU/Hurd group, you can to read about my experiments 
> with Hurd in Virtualbox and in the real PC. I was
> talking with Thomas Schwindge in this group.
>
> Now I have to study my exams, but someday I would to contribute to Hurd 
> project 
>
> El Jueves 7 de junio de 2018, Samuel Thibault escribió:
>> Joshua Branson, le jeu. 07 juin 2018 09:56:31 -0400, a ecrit:
>> > P.S. Samuel feel free to let me know if this email sounded too 
>> > presumptuous.
>> 
>> It doesn't sound so to me. Thanks for writing it :)
>> 
>> (I just doubt that much business can be done with the Hurd, but who
>> knows :) )
>> 
>> Samuel
>> 
>>