Re: how to "install" guixsd on a digitalocean server

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Andy,

Andy Wingo <address@hidden> skribis:

> I just "installed" GuixSD on a DigitalOcean droplet.  You can't actually
> install GuixSD; you have to mutate an existing installation into
> GuixSD.  But fine.

Thanks a lot for the detailed report!  It shows just how much room for
improvement there is.  Some of the issues are not simple to fix, but we
should do something about it.

> But at this point it started carping about locales.  The manual doesn't
> mention what you need to do until later on, but what you do is this:
>
>     ~/.guix-profile/bin/guix package -i glibc-utf8-locales
>     export GUIX_LOCPATH=$HOME/.guix-profile/lib/locale
>
> Then what init file do you add to for the environment variables?  I
> think it's ~/.profile but IDK.  I did this:
>
>     echo 'source ~/.guix-profile/etc/profile' >> ~/.profile
>
> However this didn't include the LOCPATH thing, so you have to do this
> too:
>
>     echo 'export GUIX_LOCPATH=$HOME/.guix-profile/lib/locale' >> ~/.profile

In
<https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=1165b08f8683b2a8c12753eb6fd26c2451bce81c>,
I fixed it by adding ‘glibc-utf8-locales’ and ‘glibc-final’ to the
tarball, and also documenting ~/.guix-profile/etc/profile.

We have to be aware that this will only placate people whose locale is
in this set, but that’s already an improvement, I think.

> OK.  Only problem now is that ~/.guix-profile/etc/profile has absolute
> paths in it, instead of pointers into the user's $HOME.  Humm.

Yeah, one has to define GUIX_PROFILE.

> Anyway!  Off to update my Guix:
>
>     guix pull
>
> Unfortunately this failed due to lack of memory.  I had installed on the
> smallest instance with 512MB memory.  So for now I bumped it up to 1G
> and retried and was able to upgrade.  Then:

Yeah.  :-/

>     guix package -i emacs
>
> but I found that was installing X things and cancelled; had to ask on
> IRC what was the right thing because guix package --search=emacs showed
> too much info for me to find emacs-no-x :)

‘guix package -A emacs’ or ‘guix package -s emacs | grep ^name’ would
have helped, but not that convenient, I agree.

>     (operating-system
>       (host-name "guix-potluck")

Oh oh!  :-)

> That's all.  Hope yall find this useful.  Now, to clean up the remaining
> Debian bits!

Neat, congrats!

If DigitalOcean supports it, we could ship a GuixSD qcow2/whatever image
that’s directly usable without having to go through this Debian step, as
Leo suggested recently.

Ludo’.