Re: Dualbooting with guixsd not handling grub installation

[Jelle Licht]

2017-12-10 0:35 GMT+01:00 Martin Castillo <address@hidden>:

Hi guixers,

I want to dualboot into GuixSD. My main os is currently NixOS.
Currently, I don't want to let guixsd control my grub setup. So my
situation is similar to [1].

One solution is to use the unreliable chainloading with blocklists by
invoking grub-install --force /dev/sda3 after every guix system
reconfigure config.scm. (The config.scm has sda3 as grub target.)

The second (and IMHO the right) solution I am aware of is adding the
following in the grub.cfg which is handled by nix:
   menuentry "GuixSD - Configloader" {
     configfile (hd0,gpt3)/boot/grub/grub.cfg
   }

This way, grub loads the newest grub config file created from GuixSD.
There is only a minor annoyance:
guix system reconfigure config.scm returns non-zero and spits out an
error (because grub-install wants --force to use blocklists). But it
succeeds in everything else, especially in creating a new
/boot/grub/grub.cfg.
The alternative (guix system reconfigure --no-bootloader config.scm)
doesn't update /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
I'd like to have a way to have /boot/grub/grub.cfg updated without
reinstalling grub on the disk/partition and without having a command
return non-zero.

This could be done by adding a cli argument for reconfigure or allowing
an empty string in (grub-configuration (target "")).

WDYT?

Martin Castillo


[1]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2014-12/msg00046.html
--
GPG: 7FDE 7190 2F73 2C50 236E  403D CC13 48F1 E644 08EC

This seems like a useful change. I am currently running into a similar issue

using GuixSD on a laptop /w libreboot, in a way similar to what is done at [2].

Reading your email just now reminded me that living in mediocrity is

something that can be changed when you run only/mostly free software :-).

Maybe the orphaned patch at [3] can be ad{o,a}pted to address both of these

use-cases?

- Jelle

[2]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2017-04/msg00083.html

[3]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-02/msg00116.html