HURD

The thought occurred to me that I could use the /dev/hda4 ext2fs partition (mounted at /bonus) upon which I was testing extended attributes last night as a place to install the HURD. Very soon after having this thought, I blasted away the contents of this partition (distributions of Matlab and BeOS) and unpacked a tarball containing a complete Debian HURD filesystem. Plugged in the floppy drive to the parallel port on hacktop and rebooted to make Linux see it (surely there's a way to attach the external floppy w/o rebooting?), and then used dd to write an ext2fs filesystem containing GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) to that floppy. Rebooted, GRUB started up like magic, entered the incantations to boot gnumach and hurd, and it all worked. Really slick actually. So for the first time today I ran the Hurd.