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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2004/50/
Debian Weekly News - December 21st, 2004
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Debian GNU/Hurd supports large Partitions. The latest [5]upload of
the [6]hurd package features a [7]patch by Ognyan Kulev which has
support for ext2 partitions larger than 2 GB on 32 bit systems. A
Kerneltrap [8]story has more details on the history and
implementation of the [9]patch. Over the last years, this limit had
become an increasingly annoying issue of the GNU/Hurd system, so this
change represents an important milestone for Debian's GNU/Hurd
[10]port with respect to user expectations.
5.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/2004/12/msg00874.html
6.
http://packages.debian.org/unstable/base/hurd
7.
http://debian.fmi.uni-sofia.bg/~ogi/hurd/ext3fs/
8.
http://kerneltrap.org/node/4429
9.
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2004-01/msg00095.html
10.
http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/
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--
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When we talk about free software, we usually refer to the free
software licenses. We also need relief from software patents, so our
freedom is not restricted by them. But there is a third type of
freedom we need, and that's user freedom.
Expert users don't take a system as it is. They like to change the
configuration, and they want to run the software that works best for
them. That includes window managers as well as your favourite text
editor. But even on a GNU/Linux system consisting only of free
software, you can not easily use the filesystem format, network
protocol or binary format you want without special privileges. In
traditional unix systems, user freedom is severly restricted by the
system administrator.
The Hurd removes these restrictions from the user. It provides an user
extensible system framework without giving up POSIX compatibility and
the unix security model. Throughout this talk, we will see that this
brings further advantages beside freedom.
(...snip...) [continue: <
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd-talk.html#ove>]