Installed the drive. Burned the first ISO. Some site said you could create a usable system with just the first ISO, so I thought I'd just burn the one, then get on the network and apt-get the rest of what I needed.

Flash forward two days. I am a beaten man. I just spend two days in dependency hell. The trick here, if there is one, must be to have the right things in your sources.list. In any case, I tried to be careful, but right from the start, there's still no sbcl or cmucl to install, and emacs won't install without emacs22 which won't intall without emacs22-gtk (or -nox) an emacs22-gtk won't install eithout emacs-common and emac-common won't install without emacsen-common and (here's the point) bsdmainutils and bsdmainutils absolutlely conflics with bsdmain. No matter how I tweek it. I tried removing bdsutils (bad idea) and installing bsdmainutils, but bsdmainutils also depends on bdsutils. This is all so stupid. And Emacs still won't build. It goes past where it was failing earlier, but now make boostrap alwasy hangs the system (kills all keyboard input) when it dumps emacs. So I am screwed.

I have one last hope. I burned all four of the ISOs this morning. Maybe that is my only hope of a stable repo from which to apt-get what I need. Tonight or tomorrow I will wipe the partition again and start over.

In other related news: my quest to get some kind of lispy web server running on the Hurd. Well, lessee... I really have two choices: multithreading on lisp (which I think means ecl, gcl, sbcl or cmucl) or continuations on scheme. I can't apt-get install sbcl or gcl or cmucl. clisp is not multi-threaded. I can't find any web server that runs in ecl. plt-scheme has a web server available for it, but I can't apt-get that scheme. In fact my scheme options are either guile (for which I can't find a web server) or scsh.

I have also tested a couple of servers on my GNU/Linux system -- s-hhtp-server and http.lisp. Neither could handle URLs with internal anchors in them, in the form, example.com/foo.html#anchor. Hunchentoot, which does not run on ecl to my knowledge, was beyond my ability to figure out how to get it to just serve static pages in a directory. I can't build sbcl or cmucl, so my next step might be to try to build plt-scheme from source. Oy vey.