This is, in fact, a snapshot of the Debian Sid repositories

Jun 18, 2017 17:13 GMT  ·  By

Debian GNU/Hurd maintainer Samuel Thibault was pleased to announce today the release and immediate availability for download of the Debian GNU/Hurd 2017 operating system.

Mostly a snapshot of the Debian Sid (Unstable) development distribution, Debian GNU/Hurd 2017 is here to bring users pretty much the same stability and reliability that the recently released Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" offers. However, please note that this is not an official Debian release, but an official Debian GNU/Hurd port.

"It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2017," says the dev in the mailing list announcement. "This is a snapshot of Debian "Sid" at the time of the stable Debian "stretch" release (May 2017), so it is mostly based on the same sources."

Highlights of Debian GNU/Hurd 2017

Highlights of the Debian GNU/Hurd 2017 release include the latest GNU Hurd 0.9 and GNU Mach 1.8 packages, which add a large number of improvements for the stability of the operating system under memory load and prolonged uptime, and extends the supported memory size beyond the 3GB limit.

Additionally, it improves the native fakeroot tool to be faster and much safer, which can now be used for building packages, and implements lightweight virtualization support by adding the possibility to run subhurds as a unprivileged user. Debian GNU/Hurd is currently available for the 32-bit (i386) hardware architecture.

Those interesting in installing the Debian GNU/Hurd 2017 release on their machines can download the installation ISO images right now from our website or from Debian Ports. As expected, three main Debian GNU/Hurd flavors are available, NETINST, CD, and DVD.

To make trying Debian GNU/Hurd a breeze, the development team pre-installed a disk image along with the friendly Debian installer, but they believe the easiest way to run the operating system is inside a virtual machine, such as QEMU or VirtualBox. Please read the configuration information before installing Debian GNU/Hurd.