Re: Scripts to build a Hurd distro

[David Michael]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 5:16 AM, Justus Winter
<4winter@informatik.uni-hamburg.de> wrote:
> * When I tried the QEMU-based mode, I couldn't see the guests GRUB, it
>   looks like qemu was run with -curses saying `XXX graphical mode'.

The included QEMU is patched to draw directly to the Linux
framebuffer, and it falls back to "-display curses" to give a text
console if the graphics device isn't supported.  Graphical displays
should work with i915, radeon, nouveau, and qxl drivers, so you can
add "-vga qxl" if you're testing in QEMU.

The "graphical mode" screen was probably the GRUB menu.  I'll make
GRUB detect the "-display curses" fallback and use a VGA text menu for
the next update.

> * I wonder why your image is that big.  `df' says that 4G are used,
>   that sounds like a lot.  Also, why doesn't `df' show the root
>   filesystem when invoked without parameters?  Funny.  Also, use
>   `zerofree' before compressing and distributing an image.

I think the image size is mostly due to IceCat (and everything else)
being built for development and debugging.  Disk usage and build times
nearly doubled when I added IceCat.  It has two directories in
/usr/lib at almost a gigabyte each.

Aside from a handful of native compiles, everything was installed to a
zero-filled raw image, but I'll try zerofree and maybe replace the
image if it helps compression.

I've also noticed the other issues you mentioned, but they haven't
gotten priority yet.  I'll continue poking at the system and hopefully
get around to them.

Thanks for checking it out.

David