DEBIAN/HURD Credit: www.debian.org/ports/hurd

Matt Holder goes against the Hurd to try the other GNU kernel and a ready-built operating system to run it all.

OUR EXPERT

Matt Holder has tried so many alternative OSes and kernels, that we think he may have slipped into an alternate universe.

D ebian is a super-stable operating system that is incredibly well tested and can be used for both desktop and server purposes. The Debian software repositories contain an enormous number of packages and Debian serves as the upstream for a number of distributions, including Ubuntu. Meanwhile, Ubuntu itself also serves as the base of a number of other distributions, which means you could see Debian as the grandparent. The number of hardware platforms Debian supports is staggering and includes MIPS, PowerPC, ARM64/HF, s390x and AMD64.

Hurd, on the other hand, is a distribution of software tools with the Mach kernel, and Hurd is the name of a set of daemons (services) and protocols that are designed to communicate with the Mach microkernel. Working together, these components can behave in the same way as the Linux kernel and can form part of a working operating system.

Whenever we boot our Android smartphones, Ubuntu laptops or Fedora desktops (does anybody actually still use a desktop at home?), we are using the Linux kernel. If we had turned left instead of turning right at some point, perhaps we would now be using the Mach kernel and Hurd services instead.

At this point, it’s important to discuss some of the terminology involved. Beginning in 1991, a young Finnish student called Linus Torvalds began working on a hobby project, which he named Linux. This was the humble beginnings of what we now use to interact with the hardware in our computers. Most people refer to Ubuntu or Fedora as a Linux distribution (us included). Technically, however, this is incorrect because a lot of other tools are required to complete the operating system.

One school of thought is that we should refer to these operating systems as GNU/Linux, which references the large number of GNU tools that are included in the OS.

The next item to discuss is GNU. The name uses an incredibly nerdy recursive acronym to represent GNU is Not Unix (laugh damn you!–ED). GNU encompasses nearly 400 tools that can be used to build an operating system. This collection of tools includes compilers, libraries, core utilities, debuggers and the Bash shell, which is used in a huge number of operating systems. GNU software is largely released under one of its own licences, of which the most well known is the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL can cause issues for companies that use GPLreleased code, because one of the stipulations is that any edits made to the code need to be made available for others to benefit from. This is an issue if a company wants to keep its additions to itself – whether this is ethical or not is outside of the scope of this article.