Hello

I want to try Debian Hurd

which should I download from ftp.debian-ports.org/debian-cd/hurd-i386/current ?

Is here anyone runs GNU/Hurd?

@Pandya I'd ask on IRC. Though I don't think running the HURD is an especially useful way of spending the time.

Point of clarification - are garbage answers like those for unix.stackexchange.com/q/261233/4671 eventually garbage collected? I think I read that somewhere.

@FaheemMitha all the answers there are already deleted...

... ya think that might have been important info? :-/

@derobert Yes, but they are still there. Just invisible to people without the necessary rep.

@FaheemMitha I don't think those ever go away, but not completely sure.

@FaheemMitha I don't have the rep to see the "garbage" answers, but in general deleted answers and questions do not get purged from the system. Exceptions are if someone asks a CM to purge it, the user gets "destroyed" (which is pretty rare and can only be used in limited situations) and maybe if the question/answer was flagged as spam and deleted by the bot.

@derobert @StrongBad I thought that under certain conditions they do get purged. I.e. when the question has a negative score, and no questions with a positive score. Or something like that.

I think spam/offensive get hidden, but the edit history retains them. Odd that none of those died of offensive flags.

One of those garbage answers says "deleted by cuonglm, don_crissti, chaos 2 hours ago". How did that happen?

Can you vote to delete?

Yes.

I think when it has a negative score, and when it gets flagged/put into one of the review queues

Huh. I don't see a button for that. What rep do you need?

unix.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/trusted-user

20k

@derobert Sorry, lazy.

Dammit, I'm not a trusted user.

@derobert Did you notice that the young chap (the "young" is an educated guess) with wireless and sound problems managed to fix them by using 4.4?

no, but makes sense. 4.3 fixed the sound. Just needed newer drivers.

Was apparently pretty new hardware.

@derobert Apparently. It's encouraging that the kernel tries to keep up with hardware, at least.

@derobert Fixed the sound and broke X, apparently.

I've never used hardware that required the most recent kernel.

Usually I stick to hardware that is very well supported.

@FaheemMitha well, not sure if he ever managed to install the newer xorg intel driver. That probably would have worked.

I bet it was "working" with the VESA/etc driver before

@derobert Maybe. Why would a kernel change break X?

I thought the kernel was pretty much decoupled from user space. He said 4.4 didn't break X.

Kernel Intel driver added the chipset, so suddenly xorg tried to use the intel driver instead of a generic (slow) one like VESA...

@derobert I don't follow.

@FaheemMitha ... ok, or there was just a bug in 4.3. That could be too.

xorg has a VESA driver (and maybe one or two more) which uses video hardware in a very basic way, as just a framebuffer. It's slow, because it fails to use any acceleration.

That works even without real drivers.

The drivers are split in two parts, part lives in the kernel, part lives in xorg

if both parts agree its not supported, you get the VESA driver. If they get confused if its supported, it can just break

(could be fixed by forcing the VESA driver, of course)

@derobert Yes, I'm familiar with VESA. It tends to fall back to that when nothing else works, but not predictably so.

I didn't realise all X drivers included a kernel component. Then again, it talks directly to the hardware.

And if X, the sound card and the wireless card all just became supported in 4.3/4.4, this is some pretty damn recent hardware.

@BinaryZebra Please do not approve edits that add code markup to random words

@don_crissti The answer to unix.stackexchange.com/questions/261371/… is your comment, do you want to post it?

@Gilles - yes, I know (sorry if my reply there didn't make much sense - I have a severe cold...); I'll post an answer in a few minutes