Success!

Finally, after a couple of weeks of reading and false starts, I have managed to get my hands on the GNU OS.
At first I tried using the prepared CD images, which I was lead to believe by the documentation I was reading that this was the easiest route for beginners. I didn't get very far with this method at all. I would get to the first reboot into Grub, and it would give me a file not found error.

Next I tried the cross install method, which is the main route documented on the Debian GNU/Hurd page. I got a bit further with this method. I actually got to the point where GNU was doing its first boot, but I would get a IRQ problem with my network card. I tried a couple of ways to work around this, but I realised that this would probably mean I wouldn't be able to get the network configured on GNU so I looked for a third route.

The method which finally worked was to download a prepared QEMU image and run GNU from QEMU. The image I used can be found here. It was very easy to get going, I just copied the two short shell commands and I was on my way. Once this was done I then simply followed the normal instructions from the Debian page. This mainly consists of running ./native-install until you are presented with GNU's shell.

Now I'm up and running it's time to do some exploring. I will report back soon with my first impressions.

First try

Last night I sat down (with some caffeine and print outs) and had my first proper attempt at installing GNU. I've been reading as much documentation as I could find over the past week or so and I was led to believe that using the prepared CD images might be a better option for a beginner. After trying this though I'm not so sure that is true. The partitioning and installing of the base system seemed to go smoothly, but when I rebooted with the Grub CD nothing would boot from the Grub menu. I'm now going to try the main cross install method as outlined on the debian site.
I've also decided that I will write an absolute beginners guide to installing GNU once I have achieved it myself. A document that assumes a very minimal knowledge of a Unix like operating system.