Installing guix

[Amirouche Boubekki]

Hello,


I installed GNU Guix distribution on my other machine to use it more
often. This will be a bit a long explanation.

My machine is kind of recent, and previously with other distro I had
all sort of trouble with uefi. Not this time, I don't know what is the
configuration of guix, I've just setup my bios to avoid uefi.

Here is what I've done:

The 0.8 release has not wpa_supplicant and I didn't want to move the
machine around, so I modified the system/install.scm in guix-0.8 and
ran:

   # guix system disk-image gnu/system/install.scm

I dropped "--image-size=800MiB" otherwise the image failed build.

   # dd if=/gnu/store/.....image-disk of=/dev/sdb

When I boot the disk, I find out guix is version 0.7. I was under the
impression that this wasn't compatible with my system config.scm. So I
went back to guix-0.8 and changed package-mangement.scm recipe so that
guix is guix 0.8 instead of 0.7. There is also guix-devel but... This
was not very user friendly but hey, guix is alpha.

When the disk boots I connect to the wifi with the following commands

   # wpa_passphrase <ssid> <passphrase> > wpa.conf
   # wpa_supplicant -B -w<interface name> -cwpa.conf

Then:

  # dhclient <interface name>

To create partitions I used the graphical cfdisk command, then format them with:

  # mkfs.ext4 -L <name> <device>

I used two partition one for root another for home. I mounted only the
root partition (previous attempts I learned that it's not required to
mount home, but you need to create the home directory with the correct
permissions...):

  # mount -L root /mnt/

I copy pasted the config.scm to /mnt/etc/ that I had cooked started
cow-store with

  # deco start cow-store /mnt

I went swimming and when back GNU Guix was on my system :)

I did quite a bit of experiments to get nouveau drivers (libre nvidia
drivers) working. I remember trying them previously and they are (can
be) quiet good. I just tested http://minetest.net it reports that
nouveau drivers are kicking.

With slim-service, Xorg will look for a .xsession in $HOME and not
.xinitrc! I attached my .xsession file, but do not use it if you don't
have all the command available, otherwise xorg will loop-restart
indefinitly...


It's not the case anymore but at some point I had several version of
guix 0.7, 0.8-devel, and 0.9. Now I have only 0.9.

- Also su and sudo doesn't source /etc/profile.
- xterm was aweful, I installed st cf. suckless.scm I use ``guix -L
`pwd` -e "(let ((x (use-modules (suckless)))) st)"`` command to
install st. I'm wondering if there is better way to do.

- I find my "nouveau hack" quiet ugly, but I'm not sure how the
situation can be improved (cf. config.scm)
- During my test, I failed to get XORG_DRI_DRIVER_PATH working (cf
(gnu services xorg)) , nix-os is the only distro to use it.
LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH doesn't work either.
- I'm not sure anymore about .guix-profile link, whether it gets
created or not at some point.
- I don't know if it's on purpose but $HOME/.guix-profile/sbin is
missing from $PATH
- I need a hat.

At some point, I'm not sure why anymore, I had to chroot into the
installed guix from the installation disk, here is what I did:

# sh ./connect-to-wifi.sh
# mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
# mount -t proc /proc /mnt/proc
# cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/etc/
# chroot /mnt /bin/sh
# source /etc/profile
# guix-builder --build-users-group=guixbuild &
# guix foo bar baz


I still need a service for wpa-supplicant at some point, but my
current configuration is good.

So far, so good.


Thanks guix people, all the best!

config.scm
Description: Binary data

.xsession
Description: Binary data

suckless.scm
Description: Binary data