Advice about GuixSD on Serveraptor?

[Leo Famulari]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 04:47:17PM -0500, Leo Famulari wrote:
> A few months ago I had a brief discussion with a representative of
> <https://serveraptor.com> about offering GuixSD there.
> 
> They said that could accept a bootable ISO or qcow2 image.
> 
> So, we could give them the 0.12.0 GuixSD installer image, after
> converting it to the qcow2 format.
> 
> I used the following command to convert the installer to qcow2:
> 
> $ xz -d guixsd-usb-install-0.12.0.x86_64-linux.xz \
> && qemu-img convert -O qcow2 guixsd-usb-install-0.12.0.x86_64-linux \
> guixsd-usb-install-0.12.0.x86_64-linux.qcow2

I'm not sure yet, but perhaps the installation image will be
inappropriate for the Serveraptor environment.

So far, I've been able to install and reconfigure GuixSD, but I can't
re-partition the system so that the installer image's disk space can be
reclaimed afterwards. The installer is mounted as /dev/vda1, and I
installed to /dev/vda2. I can do some re-partitioning while the system
is online, but I can't move the installed system's partition "to the
left".

I also tried expanding the installer's partition while the system is
running, so that I could use `resize2fs` and then reconfigure directly
from the installer, before I realized that the installer's root
filesystem is a unionfs, which complicates things...

I had wanted to use the GuixSD installer because the image format
conversion is reproducible. So, nobody would have to trust me to provide
the right thing.

Of course, it would be a lot simpler if we made a barebones system with
`guix system vm-image`.

If we can't use the installer, how should we create and provide another
image?

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