Re: Plan for a release!

[sirgazil <sirgazil@zoho.com>]

Hi Joshua,


 ---- On Thu, 05 Mar 2020 08:42:29 -0500  <jbranso@dismail.de> wrote ----
 > Well I re-installed guix again just now, so that I could test Xfce and MATE. (1) Since I knew that
 > gnome worked just fine, I decided not to include the gnome service in my config. I also decided not
 > to include the enlightenment environment.
 > 
 > tl;dr  Xfce worked fine, and MATE failed to launch any applications.
 > 
 > The first oddity, was GDM. It worked just smoothly, but the default drop down shows that by default
 > I am going to boot into Gnome. I don't even have the gnome service in the config. That's a bit odd.

This is a known issue (see https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/37831).


 > Mate started just fine.  I did get a pop-up message 
 > 
 > "Authenticate".
 > 
 > Authentication is needed to run mat-power-backlight-helper.  I put in my password, and the dialog went away.  I did not seem to be able to launch icecat with the Application menu.  The Icecat logo was in the applications menu, but a popup said "Could not launch GNU Icecat Web Browser".  The error message is "Failed to execute child process "gio-launch-deskop" (No such file or directory).  I also could not launch mate terminal for the same reason.  Actually very few applications could launch.  I could get the file browser (thunar?) to open, but not much else.  Since MATE did not seem to work so well, I logged out.

I got a different pop-up message on my first MATE session, but I haven't had the time to report it (see https://multimedialib.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/mate-error-applet-2020-02-28.png). The message did not appear again after logging out and back in.

I'm not sure, but the problem of launching applications from application menus  may be related to the issue of launching applications when double-clicking files in file managers (Thunar, Caja, etc.) when there is more than one Desktop Environment or Window Manager available. Could you please check https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/39843 and see if you get the same behavior? If so, it would be helpful if you could report your experience in that bug report as well.


 > Joshua
 > 
 > 1. I wish I knew how I could have reconfigured my laptop instead of reinstalling everything. I
 > tried this.
 > 
 > chroot /mnt;
 > guix system reconfigure /mnt/etc/config.scm;

I may be missing something from previous messages to the list, but to reconfigure the Guix System you can copy the system configuration file in "/etc/config.scm" save it wherever you want, modify it to your liking (e.g. adding or removing more packages or services), and then

$ guix pull
$ sudo guix system reconfigure /path/to/your/config.scm