New LiveCD, Almost HAMP, and Stability

Since the last progress-related (rather than website-related) news item, way back in June, we have made good progress - do not think that we've been doing nothing!

Matthias Lanzinger (melpo) has rolled out updated GNU Mach, Hurd, and glibc packages which have made Arch Hurd a much more stable system. It seems that running vmstat 5 in another TTY may be a thing of the past now. Additionally, melpo has gone on holiday (in part) to recover from Arch Hurd stress. Hopefully we haven't been too demanding, and we hope he has fun in Japan.

Additionally, the new glibc improves X responsiveness, so it is now at a usable state for most users! Not content with merely making the system far more stable, melpo has provided us with updates to pacman and gcc, giving us versions 3.4 and 4.5.1 respectively.

Alexander Preisinger (giselher) has made great progress in enabling us to use a HAMP system - by packaging Apache and MySQL, though he is still working on PHP. It seems someone at Linode is watching us, as a comment on his blog from "Linode" suggested a HCMP system - Hurd, Cherokee, MariaDB, and PHP. Additionally, giselher updated our Xorg packages, bringing us Xorg 7.5.

Michael Walker (barrucadu) has released today a new LiveCD (if you try to download it and the mirrors don't have the file yet, please use the torrent) with updated packages and bug fixes. A more in-depth coverage of the new LiveCD can be found on his blog.

Due to an overwhelming surge in LiveCD downloads in the past month, barrucadu has found us some package and livecd mirrors; two in Germany and one in the UK. Many thanks go to our mirror providers at narfhosting.com, disposed.de, and positive-internet.com.

In other news, there are now two more subdomains on archhurd.org:

  • blogs.archhurd.org - a collection of developer blogs (currently only giselher's)

  • planet.archhurd.org - our very own blog planet, currently featuring barrucadu's, melpo's, and giselher's blogs.

And our package count keeps growing! We have recently surpassed 250 packages, and show no sign of slowing down. Though that'll probably change with the start of the next academic year as we head off to various universities and whatnot, but fear not! We'll still be working, if a bit slower.

Of course, as usual, our thanks go to the legions of Hurd, Debian, and Arch developers without whom Arch Hurd would not be possible. We may be making good progress, but we're standing on the shoulders of giants to do so.