Anyone interested in the Hurd?

[Dirge]

Hi is anyone interested in GNU/Hurd and its development? The project has been pretty slow to make progress but they do have a usable... if buggy system. After a few hours I have got it running using a GRUB boot disk in VirtualBox. My next aim is to have it booting from disk.

Is there anyone else who plays with this stuff and is interested in the Hurd?

[just brew it!]

While the modular kernel concept is pretty slick, I think the emergence of Linux as the dominant free OS kernel has made Hurd mostly irrelevant. The software ecosystem niche that Hurd was targeted at has been (almost) completely taken over by Linux. Of course, many of the userland tools used on Linux (not the least of which is the gcc compiler suite) were originally developed by the GNU project... so while their own kernel hasn't caught on (and IMO probably won't), they've played a pivotal role in the rise of Linux.

[notfred]

It will be interesting to see if it begins to replace QNX and similar for embedded micro-kernel applications if it matures further.

[bitvector]

The project has been pretty slow to make progress but they do have a usable... if buggy system.

Pretty slow is an understatement considering its development started before Linux. I remember chuckling when, just a few years ago, Hurd finally got support for ext2 filesystems greater than 2GB. Maybe it'll turn around, but it never seems to have had the necessary momentum.

IMO, of the semi-obscure not-quite-Unix OSs, Plan9 is a much more interesting for its contributions (although getting it to run is a chore these days).