funny geeky quote

During a disussion on Xen-users mailing list, I found this piece of text from Eric Johansson. It is very amusing geeky humoros quote: "yes, I tried the debootstrap route and sat there watching in childlike wonder as it presented me with a rainbow of failures. Left me muttering something about rocket club open source projects as I am often given to doing lately."

On an independent issue, while just logging into blogger.com I realized that the animation on its login page causes firefox to stammer on a linux machine. I say 'stammer' because the username-password I punch gets batched and appear abruptly later.

And firefox users! Try Aquatint - a fantastic new theme!

Ease of Linux 2.6 and Virtualization

During thanksgiving I built from the linux 2.6 source tree and realised how easy it has become to install a linux kernel from the source. 3-4 make targets and you have new kernel deployed in /boot/ with grub.conf neatly updated. Maybe because I had tough time with many experimental kernels in the past, I am finding this ease of installation surprising.

And in past 2-3 days I had a similar experience with new version of Xen - Xen 3.0. Although I heard that 'yum update' in Fedora Core 4, would install the latest Xen for me, that hadn't worked for me few months back. So I had shelved it for a while. After learning about new release of Xen, I decided to build xen 3.0. Similar to Linux 2.6, the building and installing of Xen 3.0 is very smooth. I however had first hiccup when running 'xend'. It was because of some version conflicts in some libraries, because I still had old FC4 Xen on my system. Ian Pratt precisely pointed that out on xen-users mailing list and that fixed it. Now I can run xend and tried to fork new virtual machines. I am now having problems with the file-system of my init ramdisk. Not giving ramdisk makes the VM hang at one point. I need to figure put the booting process through init ramdisk in detail to resolve this isssue.

It is amazing to know that with Intel's new VT (Vanderpool) and AMD's pacifica processors, Xen can run Windows XP unmodified. As I understand it these new hardwares will be adding a new protection level (remember those protection rings from 0 to 3 in 386 architecture?) for the VMM's hypervisor. I found it amusing that x86 architecture gave us 4 protection levels to work with and most of the OSes use just 2 of them - as for linux 0 for kernel and 3 for user programs, yet for the hypervisor technology, they needed an additional protection level outside this range. It seems that Intel VT have started shipping, but read somewhere that they are early test versions. AMD pacifica are due in early 2006. I was wondering should I wait till pacifica comes out to build my new desktop. But may be they will be early unreliable versions and probably pretty expensive. And I can't wait to play NFS most wanted, till the hardware virtualization technology stabilizes.

And yes... yesterday I tried these two firefox plugins - GSpace and Gmail notifier. GSpace finally gives a working tool to store your files on internet using your gmail account. Besides this... how can I forget del.icio.us? It has solved my long pending problem of having unified bookmarks. I use firefox/opera on windows/linux on my home/office machines. So that gives me 8 bookmark lists to synchronize. Lately I had given up synchronizing them. But with an account with del.icio.us, I can save them on internet and can access from any machine/browser/OS. They also have an import tool which I figure will allow me to import my existing bookmarks into it. No need to say, I will be spending more of my time in coming week to find new plugins around del.icio.us. :)

Xen, GSpace, Del.icio.us - When I started writing this post, I wasn't finding any common theme for this post. But now I have one - Virtualization. These three pieces of software - miles away from each other in terms of their execution domain - highlight a single trend that will reign the information technology now - 'Virtualization'. Xen virtualizes hardware from the operating systems so that multiple operating systems can run on a machine simultaneously and a single instance of operating system can be dispatched to other hardware on the fly. GSpace achieves storage virtualization by storing the files on a practically omni-present media called 'Gmail'. Del.icio.us works on the same lines by hosting our bookmark lists on some web server.

Natural keyboard

I was doing little research on natural keyboards (it's been a while that I have bought some electronic gadget) and I came across some of these amusing facts.

This particular article from Inquirer says 'natural' keyboard is a wrong design. I didn't know that shifting to natural keyboard needs some learning (which is apparently less for touch typists).

This is another funny link that tells how to make natural keyboard from regular one.

But now I have abondoned the plan of buying a new keyboard. :)

Inattentive blindness

A friend showed me this cool video clip.

http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html

BUT Before watching it read this: There are two teams of people, one wearing white clothes and other wearing black clothes. Each team has a ball that they throw to another member of the same team. Your job is to find out how many throws does the white team members do.

OK, now watch the video.

Did you find anything wierd. No? Then go back and watch the video again. But only this time, don't work on counting the number of throws of the balls, just watch the video relaxed.

Did you see what you missed first time?

Cool... isn't it?

Enjoy!!!

Do what I mean

When we hear about the user interface talks, one theme always sticks out 'Do what I mean'.

We expect our gadgets, our software programs to do what we mean and not what we tell them. But this is a challenging problem. The means by which we can "tell" our gadgets what we want, are not sufficient to convey them what we "mean". This is the gap between syntax and semantics.

The innovations in User Interface strive to bridge this gap. Ipod is an excellent example of such innovation. The advances in the desktop GUI is another.

What is it that makes it so hard a problem? Or why is this a problem at all? Here are my 2 cents on this topic, in context of my Ipod.

Why is ipod's interface more user friendly than previous music players?
Let us first see, what we want a music player to do? - play a song, go ahead/backwards one song, forward/rewind a song, browse the playlist. Each of these tasks are traditionally placed on buttons. Buttons are perhaps the only input mediums we engineers would imagine an electronic gadget to have. This is because the implementation of the music player (or any other electronic device) has been based on binary switch logic. But that is not what a user would expect. So the designers of the ipod used a wheel to hide the digital implementation to serve the analog semantics. Browsing should be as smooth a process as moving your finger is. The song skipping is however a digital command and a switch should suffice for that, so clicking the same wheel will serve the purpose.

Easiness is another aspect of ipod's UI. An interface should be intuitive. A gadget should have advanced features, but the user interface should serve only the most intuitive purpose first. So for advanced users few more controls could be stuck on the device. But that would be so ugly. Imagine having Up/Down buttons, Settings button, a button to turn on the backlight of ipod. Apple's solution to this problem is ingenious - Instead of providing these additional controls in space, hide them in time! You use the same buttons that you use for song playing, but for different length of time and voila! you uncovered an advanced feature of your ipod. It sounds so obviously 'intuitive'! Then why hasn't every gadget done this. That is because, bridging this gap between syntax and semantics requires fine engineering of the product. Time multiplexing several functions on a single hardware switch, needs carefully written code. The polling techniques to read the switch, the contraints on the size of the code - all need ace engineering. Only then, the meaning that the user expects gets conveyed to the gadget.

I've more thoughts on this issue, but 'll save them for some time in future. Till then, any comments are welcome.

Curtains for Windows

This is about two new tools I found that are supposed to enhance the Windows experience.

Despite lots of windows bashing, it remains the fact that it is the operating system of a layman. But that doesn't give MS any excuse not to improve upon the UI. According to me, one of the biggest shortcomings of Windows desktop is it's lack of support for multiple workspaces. It is such handy utility to have that it is inexcusable not to provide that with Windows desktop. Thanks to Linux desktop developers (or whoever invented this notion before linux) for supporting this utility in GNOME,KDE desktops.

Fortunately one does not have to stop for the MS to provide this utility in the OS. Third party tools have been around that give you this experince on Windows desktop as well. I had used Exceed's multiple workspaces feature and was using it for a short while (soon I switched to linux through VNC). Yesterday I found this tool Virtuawin that gives you this feature and with enormous control over your UI experience. You can have any number of virtual desktops in any layout XxY. The switching between desktops can be done using mouse, keyboard. You also have a say on where your mouse pointer will be after you switch. A tiny icon in taskbar is used in most intuitive ways possible. I however did not run it with lots of windows open - to test the performance.

The other tool I found was Task Switcher. When you press Alt+Tab this utility overrides the default bar at the center of screen by a window, with the list of running applications. Sadly it doesn't work well with my WindowsBlinds. I like linux's temporary window raising utility over Windows flat bar. This particular tool might fulfill that need of Windows users.

I found these utilities from an article posted on /.. It has few more tools as well.

Google Like Search Engine in your name

This is cool. Goto www.googlefor.com and Enter the name you would like to see instead of the 'Rainbow Google' logo on your google homepage. Hit create and check out the link it generates.

Only downside. The search results generated although powered by google, don't give all the exact features that google offers on its search results page.

Cool idea though.

Raed tihs

Can you raed tihs? Olny srmat poelpe can.I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

Subscribing to my blog

Hey, if you are interested in getting email updates when I publish posts on my blog, let me know your email address.

If you use an RSS or Atom client, you can use this link jyro.blogspot.com/atom.xml to subscribe to my blog.

Message in a bottle

Not that I read poetry and understand it. But these are the lyrics of John Mayer's song, that I liked very much. These are some lines from the song that tell the idea...

' Just cast away and I am lost at sea oh
Another lonely day and no one here but me oh
More loneliness than any man could bare
Rescue me before I fall into despair ......

I send an S.O.S. to the world
I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle

....

Walked out this morning I dont believe what I saw
A hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore
Seems I'm not alone at being alone
A hundred billion castaways all looking for a home'


Enjoy!!!!

[This and other songs of John Mayer are also good to ears ... give him a try]

fiasco UX

Recently I found about yet another way of running L4 microkernel. Fiasco UX runs on top of Linux. The bootstrapping tasks of L4 micro-kernel are modified to run on top of linux, and the servers up the stack run unmodified. This way crashing of an experiment does not need rebooting of the machine - same advantages as running the OS on top of a simulator. Fiasco UX has a kernel debugger as well, and I would think that fiasco-UX is less CPU intensive alternative to a complete processor simulator.

Starting using fiasco-UX is relatively easy, considering that you don't have to risk other OSes on your machine while doing this. Checkout l4, dope, l4Env modules from the TU Dresden's CVS repository. Build the fiasco kernel for UX inside l4/kernel/fiasco. Follow the instructions on:
http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/fiasco/ux/building.shtml

Then build the various servers provided under l4/pkg/ directory. These servers include sigma0, rmgr, log, names, etc. Compile these servers step by step. Once you have enough binaries you can launch fiasco microkernel as any other linux application.

Besides this, I found link to the slides of a course being taught at Karlsure university on microkernel programming, thanks to a post on l4-hackers mailing list.
http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/Studium/KMB/

Many slides are helpful in explaining the key L4 concepts. It also involves a project that involves developing a simple game on top of L4.

Will post more soon...

Back to the L4

It's been a couple of months that I stopped working on L4. The main reason was the frustration due to so many errors and failures.

But now I am back. This time I decided to use emulator. My main interest is in coding rather than wasting time in installation on real hardware. So I first tried Bochs. And had trouble getting right versions of the kernel and patches that were required to install pistachio. Also the guy had incomplete tutorial, so couldn't figure out what to do after compiling the kernel. Here is the link:
http://home.kamp.net/home/farid.hajji/l4ka-bochs/

Then I heard of QEMU.
http://hurd.gnufans.org/bin/view/Hurd/QemuImageForL4

The page tells how to install HURD and L4 on QEMU. But I was only interested in L4. So I only downloaded the pistachio demodisk from l4ka.org and ran it with QEMU:

$ qemu -dummy-net  -serial stdio -fda pistachio-ia32-0.4-demodisk.bin -boot a

And it just booted the qemu into pistachio for me. That's amazing. But the coolest thing is yet to come.

I learnt that this demodisk can be mounted as a file system, so I peeped into it by mounting it (described in the gnufans link above). This demodisk by default loads the pingpong program. So the demodisk has a pingpong binary among other stuff. Now pingpong is the simplest program you could expect to see in L4 source tree. It is just one file pingpong.cc, with a main method. So it occured to my mind, that one can start coding the kernel if he\she can modify this file and just replace the binary in the demodisk with your own binary. Pretty easy.

But the compilation was a major trouble. It was the main trouble in my last experience with L4 and the main reason to drive me away. The key problem is the compiler version. I had suspected that back then, but couldn't install gcc 2.95 from its source code and later couldn't find all the rpms for the job. As my previous post indicates I recently got hold of full suite of gcc 2.95 rpms and I successfully downgraded my gcc version to 2.95. Once done, it was just matter of typing make. And the binaries were ready.

I changed one message in the menu presented by pingpong to display my name, compiled it, and replaced the binary in the mounted demodisk with the new pingpong binary. Ran the QEMU and VOILA!!! My name was on the screen.

It's really a great start of the second inning with L4.

So to summarize, use gcc 2.95 with L4. Try your luck on an emulator, rather than getting frustrated with reboots of your real machine.

One more

Technical Skill is the mastery of complexity, while Creativity is the
mastery of simplicity....

Nice quote

Murphy's Law fails only when you try to demonstrate it, and thus succeeds.

GCC 2.95 rpms

Got one link that has all the rpms required for GCC 2.95 . This is useful when you want to downgrade your GCC suite to 2.95 because some projects won't compile with newer versions of GCC (L4 source in my case).

repeat (ps | grep) = filtered top

If you wished you could have grep'd and monitored only few processes in top, this script is for you - ptop.sh:

while(true)
do
ps -ef | grep $1
sleep 1
clear
done

Run it:
% ptop.sh xterm

And you can see all the xterms currently running and refreshed every second.

Halo fixed on ATI Mobility Radeon 9000

I could run Halo running on my laptop without crashing the OS intermittently. The problem as I knew was due to the incompatibility of my old video driver. Although I installed the required DirectX 9 successfully, the game used to crash when run with all its best features (high graphic details, sound effects and controller support etc.). But if I run it in safe mode it would run fine, but that would be with all main features stripped (no audio - makes no sense in playing Halo without audio, no controller support, poor graphics).

Right solution is to install ATI's latest drivers (latest versions of ATI Catalyst) but I read that it doesn't work unless you reinstall the Windows.

So I decided to run Halo with degenerate graphics, but I wanted other features intact. After a bit of googling I came to know that Halo.exe could be run from command line with various commandline options and that way you could choose what features to drop.

Here is the link http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830487

Here are the options that I use E:\Halo\halo.exe -novideo -useff -console

Direct X 9 installation problem

After a long time, I decided to play games and was struggling to install direct X 9 on my XP for playing some demo games. Great windows wouldn't allow me to install this driver. I said, the software did not pass Windows Logo testing. Now this gives you no direct clue about what the real problem would be.

After doing some googling, I found that this logo testing is the check that windows XP does so that only the softwares intended for this OS version will be installed. In the past versions such mismatches would cause only warnings, but now they are banned.

Then doing some more googling made me understand that the XP's version is subject to the installation of security patches. So first I tried uninstalling the patches that were previously installed by 'windows update', hoping that this will downgrade the OS version, and maybe that will match the version expected for the direct X driver. (This naive random trick did however fixed another problem of mine - detection of my Windows optical desktop after each reboot and prompt for reinstalling drivers for it.)

Then I checked the direct X website of Microsoft and found that there is one security patch associated with it - numbered 839643.

After installing this patch, I could install the direct X 9 successfully.

Such errors from the OS should give the exact cause of occurence. Failing to do so, is very serious UI flaw. Why didn't the installer for DirectX 9 had information about the security patches it needs? In the first place, installation of security patches (which has become quite frequent process in for Windows platform) should not make it incompatible with new software installations - and that too for superfluous reasons (version mismatch?).

car wallpapers

Very good site for car wallpapers

www.desktopmachine.com

warning: const is a keyword in ANSI C

While moving to compiler on Solaris machine if you encounter this warning

"warning: const is a keyword in ANSI C"

Check you this site:
http://www.fftw.org/faq/section2.html

" You should be aware that Solaris comes with two compilers, namely, /opt/SUNWspro/SC4.2/bin/cc and /usr/ucb/cc. The latter compiler is non-ANSI. Indeed, it is a perverse shell script that calls the real compiler in non-ANSI mode. In order to compile FFTW, change your path so that the right cc is used."

Not much on L4 front

I am not working much on L4 for last couple of weeks. Have been reading 'Coalscent', now getting bored of it.

After I got my system up with Fedora Core 3 and fighting a lot with gcc versions, I have run into this problem with grub. Now when I install grub 0.90 - the one modified for L4, it gets to the command prompt mode and not the usual grub menu. I don't know how to boot from command prompt. I am sure though, that the solution to this must be very trivial and I haven't worked on it out of sheer laziness for past few days.

I wish I get over these small hurdles soon and get to do some programming on L4.

Meanwhile, got hold of a superb game...... guess which one..... 'njam'..... windows version of PacMAN :)))))))))).

Last two weeks I have been redoing everything since I had to install new linux - Fedora Core 3. I tried it because the problems I were getting for my MS wireless keyboard-mouse USB driver. It worked. But during some experiments I had to reinstall couple of times. Now to compile the L4, drops package and L4Linux 2.6 with the GCC 3.4.2 that comes with FC3 is a pain. So I had to downgrade all my gcc tools to lower version 3.2-7. This is giving me some troubles because of many dependencies. GCC 3.4.2 has made some syntactic checks more strict, thus barking errors in some cases instead of letting them go with warning message. I reported these on the mailing list, but they are just happy to stick with the old GUI. So that's what I am doing.

Once I get the L4 system boot, I want start experimenting with run-l4 program from linux, which executes binaries designed for L4.

Loads of ASCII arts

http://www.chris.com/ascii/

The Linux BootPrompt HOWTO

Exactly what I was looking for from yesterday

http://ldp.rtin.bz/HOWTO/BootPrompt-HOWTO.html#toc2

GRUBbing

For past two days I was stuck on this issue with GRUB. I downloaded L4Linux-Fiasco bootable CD last weekend. Running L4Linux out of the CD was very easy, considering my failed attempts with L4Linux-pistachio. But booting from the CD did not mounted the harddisk filesystem. So I reverse engineered the booting mechanism from the CD and tried to change my Grub Bootloader to load the fiasco kernel and L4Linux module. I copied these binaries from CD to my harddisk /boot.

But this was not sufficient. The booting of this kind with gnu-grub fails - but it fails gracefully giving very useful message that you need Desden's modified grub bootloader to load their kernel. So there started my GRUBbing. Out of total lack of common sense, it took me couple of days of how to download dresden's grub source code. But even after building the grub binaries, it was very hard to figure out how to install it. "make install" places the binaries in some bin, sbin directories, but I knew that it has to do something more subtle (below the file system) to install the new bootloader. I manually replaced some binaries from /boot/grub, /sbin/, /usr/local/bin etc., even after knowing that it wasn't of any use. Meanwhile I read through GRUB manual, posted on mailing list, but no use. I ran grub-install script, but still no use. You have to give to grub-install the device on which you want to load the bootloader. I naively gave /dev/hda6, the device which holds my '/' mount. Then yesterday I found this link

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~jhall/grub_install_hda1.html

talking about recovering the system after the person had accidently installed the grub stage1 onto his windows partition. There I found out that to reinstall the grub you need to execute grub-install with /dev/hda.

This worked...

After some twiking of grub.conf I got the machine booted with fiasco and L4Linux binaries downloaded from the CD. However this worked, the binaries are somehow tied to the CD and won't mount my hard disk file systems and won't even work without CD. So I am planning now to build all those binaries separately and boot them.

Meanwhile I will again give a shot to booting L4Linux-Pistachio with my new GRUB.

Stumbled on hurd

Stuck in a chicken-n-egg problem on hurd front. I needed to access network through my ethernet port from Hurd. The pfinet translator won't work easily. After googling, and searching through the archives I picked up the notion that the driver for my ethernet card is not present in gnumach. (I know in microkernel implementation drivers are not part of kernel, but I found the driver code under gnumach/linux/drivers.... directory. The Space.c file does not seem to have Broadcom driver code) My ethernet controller card is "Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5702X Gigabit Ethernet". I downloaded the linux driver source code from Broadcom's site. In Space.c a *_probe() function is called. Each hardware vendor defined his own _probe() function and using some macros that particular function is called. So I had a plan to integrate Broadcom's probe function with the gnumach source code, recompile the thing and try.

But this effort has stuck in an chicken-n-egg problem as mentioned earlier. For compiling the kernel, I need gcc, make, etc. I installed make some time back, it was simple .deb file. It was hard to find .deb package for hurd-i386 for gcc. Folks on mailing lists advised me to use apt-get to install gcc. It later on occured to me that apt-get internally gets the installation packages from the internet... which in the first place I am trying to access. :(

So I tried to solve this, by means of cross compiling exercises. Yesterday I tried to compile gcc 2.95 on linux for i686-pc-gnu platform, and it is giving its own set of errors.

Alongside I have been reading about the L4 kernel and Hurd efforts of porting to L4. I am getting interested in installing L4Ka::Pistachio microkernel. So I might suspend efforts on Hurd front and might follow a new lead.

Besides in past few days, I have found some good linux stuff, that I didn't know already.

#cat /proc/pci should give you wealth of information about the hardware devices attached to your pci bus, like the IRQ info and rest of PCI info.

Learnt about this linux command strace, with which you can track the system calls and signals associated with a live running process.

It was a news to me that, there is a subdirectory under /proc for every process, named after its process id. This subdirectory contains useful info about that process. Among other things it holds an fd subdirectory, which will list all the file descriptors opened by that process.

Good stuff for debugging your system....

I am particularly impressed by the work done by Jochen Liedtke, the father of L4. Sad to know that he passed away in 2001. His paper 'On microkernel design' is a classic one. I am planning to follow whatever job he has done on microkernels.

make problem solved

I was stupidly wondering why won't my /usr/bin/make won't work. Posted many emails in past 3-4 days and ultimately it took installation of make_3.80-9_hurd-i386.deb to make the 'make' utility work. The original make binary was just corrupt i guess.

No luck with Xfree86 installation dependencies, no progress with setting up network access.

One more useful thing I learnt yesterday. How to get your IP address, Gateway and Network mask. These three are needed to setup network with pfinet in HURD.

In linux use,

[root@localhost jayesh]# netstat -rn
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags MSS Window irtt Iface
192.168.2.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
0.0.0.0 192.168.2.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0

[root@localhost jayesh]# /sbin/ifconfig -a
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0B:DB:DA:D6:42
inet addr:192.168.2.10 Bcast:192.168.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:827 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:863 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:428907 (418.8 Kb) TX bytes:124307 (121.3 Kb)
Interrupt:11

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:5107 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:5107 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:348486 (340.3 Kb) TX bytes:348486 (340.3 Kb)

One irritating catch for less-informed like me is, ifconfig was found in /sbin and it wasn't in my PATH, so that command won't execute by default. So if you get 'No such file found' complaint from your shell when google says it should work, try looking in your /sbin, /usr/sbin directories, ones that are not in your PATH

Installed HURD console

Yesterday I installed console on my GNU/HURD setup. It's very cool. It lets me switch between number of terminals even in command line interface. Never seen this thing in command line. The installation was straighforward as pointed on http://hurd.gnufans.org/bin/view/Hurd/HurdConsole.

Later I tried to make XFree86 work on my system referring to http://hurd.gnufans.org/bin/view/Hurd/Xfree86. But no luck with that yet. I don't understand how to tackle the dependency problem while installing the required packages for XFree86, namely x-window-system-core and others listed.

Later on I also tried to setup network connection. But it is giving me errors like
/hurd/pfinet: eth0: (os/device) no such device

Will do some googling on these issues today.