Re: Installing guix

[Ludovic Courtès]

Amirouche Boubekki <address@hidden> skribis:

> 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.

Yeah, Guix doesn’t support UEFI.  (I’m not sure exactly what it takes,
but we should discuss that in a bug.)

> 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.

Maybe the ‘guix’ command above is 0.7, no?

> 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>

OK.

> 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 :)

Nice.  Guix is good for your health!  :-)

> 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.

Good.

> With slim-service, Xorg will look for a .xsession in $HOME and not
> .xinitrc!

Could you email address@hidden for that?

> 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...

I think .xsession should end with “exec dwm”, no “dwm”.
Also, see <http://bugs.gnu.org/19119>.

> 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.

This should be fixed with the recent changes in that area.

> - 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.

“guix -L $PWD st” should work, provided $PWD/suckless.scm exists.

BTW, you’re welcome to submit these new packages!

> - I find my "nouveau hack" quiet ugly, but I'm not sure how the
> situation can be improved (cf. config.scm)

I thought xf86-video-nv (already in xorg.scm) is Nouveau, but apparently
it’s not?

You’re more knowledgeable than me in this area as you can see ;-), so
please do submit the packages and tricks that appear in your config.scm
so we can make things work out-of-the-box for future Nouveau users.

> - 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.

Could you be more precise?

> - I'm not sure anymore about .guix-profile link, whether it gets
> created or not at some point.

~/.guix-profile is created the first time ‘guix package’ is used.

> - I don't know if it's on purpose but $HOME/.guix-profile/sbin is
> missing from $PATH

Right.  I think it’s fine this way.  WDYT?

> - I need a hat.

Sorry, can’t help with that.

> 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:

Well, I’m not sure why either.  :-)

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

Great.  Well, thanks for the detailed feedback!  I think you owe us a
couple of bug reports and a bunch of new packages now.  :-)

Ludo’.