mintCast 178 – We Tried Hurd To Like It!

News:

Cinnamon 2.0 feature-freeze – The new DE will be featured in the end of November within Linux Mint 16 Petra, and later backported to Linux Mint 13 Maya LTS and LMDE. (segfault.linuxmint.com)

Ubuntu 13.10 Desktop Will Not Use XMir By Default – While the Ubuntu 13.10 desktop was expected to ship with Mir/XMir by default for supported configurations, this is no longer going to happen. (phoronix.com)

After switching 37,000 PCs to Ubuntu, French Armed Forces says open source cuts costs 40 percent – The French Gendarmerie, a branch of the French Armed Forces in charge of public safety, has been a leader in moving away from proprietary software in recent years. (geek.com)

The GNU Hurd is the GNU project’s replacement for the Unix kernel. It is a collection of servers that run on the Mach microkernel to implement file systems, network protocols, file access control, and other features that are implemented by the Unix kernel or similar kernels.
Advantages of the Hurd (http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/advantages.html)
Mach is a first-generation microkernel. A microkernel implements a minimal number of abstractions that facilitate the realization of operating system services. (gnumach)
The Mach Interface Generator (MIG) is an IDL compiler. It hides the details of Mach’s IPC and port machinery and make it easy to implement and use Mach interfaces. (gnu_mig)
Translators – A translator is simply a normal program acting as an object server and participating in the Hurd’s distributed virtual file system. (translator)

Arch Hurd (http://www.archhurd.org/) is a derivative work of Arch Linux porting it to the GNU Hurd system with packages optimised for the i686 architecture. (Wiki) (Live_CD) (Install_Guide)