At Fri, 05 Dec 2014 00:04:23 +0100,
Ludovic Courtès wrote:
Tomas Cech <address@hidden> skribis:
> I tried to install Guix as alternative OS to my Gentoo and openSUSE
> installations to give a try. I tried unsupported scenario -
> installation on LVM volume and separate /boot partition until I was
> told it is unsupported. Separate boot wasn't hard as I had to just
> copy generated files so they are loaded.
OK, but there’s still an open bug on that topic. :-)
http://bugs.gnu.org/19220
Good, I'll give a try again.
> 1] if you set device to partition (and not to disk) in your
grub-configuration like this:
>
> (bootloader (grub-configuration
> (device "/dev/sda4")))
Why would you want to use a partition and not a disk? I didn’t know
this was even possible.
Because this way I can separate Grub managed by Guix and Grub from my
Gentoo. As I'm playing with that on my notebook I need for work, this
way can reduce risks.
I'm not sure how Guix installer can manipulate with grub.cfg and I'd
like to always have some working system...
> `guix system init' will fail on grub installation. By default Grub
> tries to fit in the beginning of partition and fails if it can't fit
> in. I asked about this behaviour on Grub mailing list and it seems
> that there are two options:
>
> a] add `--force' to command line and use block list for keeping information
about position of Grub's core.img
> b] use filesystem which allows embedding - BtrFS or ZFS
>
> I verified both options (a] and then b] with BtrFS) and it no longer fails.
>
> But,
> ad a] - I don't feel safe passing `--force' to grub-install every
> time. So if installation fails on this point and you'd like to use
> your FS anyway, you can pass `--no-grub' to `guix system init' and
> then rung grub-install manually.
>
> ad b] - I don't feel safe using still experimental BtrFS.
OK. I think the conclusion for Guix is to leave the defaults unchanged.
Perhaps we could add a ‘force?’ field to the ‘grub-configuration’ data
type to allow those who know what they doing to get the effect of
‘--force’. WDYT?