Re: GuixSD on commodity hosting platforms, hoster: IN-Berlin

[Ludovic Courtès]

Leo Famulari <address@hidden> skribis:

> On Thu, Feb 09, 2017 at 06:36:09PM +0000, ng0 wrote:
>> today I had a short message exchange with the hoster "IN-Berlin"[0], a
>> non-commercial group predating the widespread access of internet in
>> Germany.
>> 
>> It turns out that it could be as simple as providing them with the raw
>> disk image, so I will give it a try soon.
>
> 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
>
> The results are available at
> <https://famulari.name/a2249a95c83f60bc75efe89b6fe4f01d/>.
>
> I'd like for someone to try this conversion themself and verify that it
> creates the same qcow2 file.

The image itself is most likely not bit-reproducible, if that’s what you
mean (non-reproducible packages, uncontrolled file system layout, etc.)

> If it does, then we can ask Serveraptor to make it available for testing
> on their platform.

That would be great!

For these use cases, I wonder if it makes sense to provide the
installation image.  Wouldn’t it be more convenient if we provided, say,
the “bare-bones” image or a variant thereof?  That way, as a user, you
could directly use it as-is, or just run ‘reconfigure’ in it.

Thanks,
Ludo’.