Today (OK, this night) I created some codeswarm movies to visualize the code history of the Hurd.

What's particularly interesting to me in gnumach is the tschwinge - sthibaul effect in march 2008, where development suddenly seems to speed up enormeously.

The code movies are created from the history of the cvs branches gnumach and hurd.

The movies:

• gnumach

• hurd

• hurd wiki

in gnumach, red is the "kern", while in "hurd" red is stuff in "release".

.doc. is dark blue and any stuff named .linux. is shown in a blue-green in both.

The hurd wiki movie shows all web commits as "web-hurd@gnu.org", and you can clearly see that most changes are being done via the version control system. There's a way to split the web-commits, but since there aren't many, I leave that for another day - article on the ikiwiki page.

Best wishes, Arne

In the past few months the Hurd got quite many commits.

I want to write a bit about the changes they brought, and what they mean to the Hurd.

If some of my comments seem too 'simple' to you, just ignore them

First we got many Bug fixes from Samuel Thibault, mainly in libpthread (multithreading), ext2fs and libdiskfs (both filesystem interaction).

Then hurd-l4 (the port of the Hurd on the L4 kernel) seems to get quite much love by Neal H. Walfield (neal) at the moment. Quite much is saying a bit to little: hurd-l4 looks steamingly active in the commits

And there is the PyHurd project. It attempts to create a full binding to the GNU/Hurd API, so people should someday be able to, for example, create translators in Python.

There's been more - a lot more in fact, but much of it is above my coding horizon, and this entry shall end someplace (it's late - too late ).

Best wishes, Arne

Yesterday I spent a few hours trying to get my german keyboard to let me use my umlauts (and to let me type without having to hunt down the right keys), but without much luck.

I got xkb installed after following this FaQ answer:

• http://www.gnu.org/s/hurd/faq.en.html#q4-4

and this info:

• http://people.debian.org/~mbanck/hurd-console.default

(you can find the second under /etc/default/hurd-console ).

But I didn't get it to work.

What I did in short:

First I got the needed apt-sources:

• http://debian.duckcorp.org/

Then I installed the xkb console:

• apt-get install console-driver-xkb

And set it in the file /etc/default/hurd-console

Sadly it didn't work, but maybe this posts will give You the needed headstart for success (I'd be glad to see a guide from you!).

Some additional info:

• http://kerneltrap.org/node/420
• http://www.bddebian.com/~wiki/hurd/console/