Re: New Install

[Ludovic Courtès]

Richard <address@hidden> skribis:

>> From: Andy Wingo <address@hidden> 
>> It is, if you want to share /home but not not /etc, /var, and so on. 
>
> Sharing was never of interest - I just wanted to have the safety net of 
> having another bootable OS. In the end I have decided to wipe Slackware 
> and completely embrace the GNU... 

Well, welcome then.  ;-)

Depending on what safety net one is after, it’s possible to either using
Guix on another distro, or use GuixSD with binaries from the previous
distro still available on the root file system (GuixSD overwrites
/bin/sh but leaves /usr and the rest of /bin untouched.)

> That leads to another question. What are appropriate partition sizes when 
> using guix? From my brief reading it seems that guix will be storing lots 
> of data below /gnu/store. For Slackware I just use a 5GB root partition 
> and have never needed more. Should I infer that guix will be more greedy 
> for disk space? 

Currently Guix is definitely more greedy than Debian, for instance,
which has all these tiny binary packages made from a single source
package.  It may be more greedy than Slackware, so it may be best to
have more than 5 GiB.

>> In practice you'd be obliged to move to grub. 
>
> Fair enough. May I suggest that at some point (many, many months from now) 
> it might be worth re-visiting that idea? I expect that I am not the only 
> user who might consider multibooting and who has an established boot
> system. 

The main difficulty here is that the GRUB config file that GuixSD
generates typically include references to files under /gnu/store, and
one wouldn’t want to maintain that by hand.

The other thing is that the GRUB menu generated by GuixSD includes
pointers to previous generations of the OS, which allows users to roll
back if needed (a convenient safety net.)

Thanks,
Ludo’.