My experience installing Guix system

My experience installing Guix system

[divoplade]

Hello Guix,

By following the official instructions for installing guix, I have read
that you might be interested in how someone would manage to install it
by hand. So this is what I will do here.

My situation is I have two computers: one I intend as a server, and one
I use as a desktop. I wanted to try installing guix on the desktop
before going ahead and installing it for my server. I was very
interested in the guile sexps and gexps for defining services, and the
fact that I would not forget which services I had installed, which ones
were expected to run and how they were configured, having an obvious
root of the system definition -- /etc/config.scm. I don't have a lot of
time for the management of the system, and guix has as built-in
basically every service I wanted, so my guess is I need to try. Plus,
despite my computer system requiring dirty firmware, I consider the
issue of software freedom of great importance.

I had tried it some time ago, but now I realize that both my systems
need special firmware in order to even boot the installer. Retrying now
with added firmware, even if I managed to load the installer, it would
choke on existing partitions that are neither crypt devices, ext4 file
systems or fat32 file systems. So I had to do an automatic partitioning
scheme before trying a manual one.

This was enough for the installer-plus-firmware to generate the system
config file, but it crashed right before actually generating the
system. And of course, I needed to add firmware to the generated
system, so I would need to run guix pull before guix init anyways.

The next step was installing regular debian on the partition I intended
for /home, then installing the guix package manager on top of it,
mounting the other partitions (/boot/efi and the / crypt device), and
running guix system init from within debian. I commented out the file
system for /home in the guix definition before that, so everything in
guix was installed into one partition.

Then, I booted into guix, erased the debian system, used the partition
as a crypt device for /home, rebooted, and everything worked.

There is just one caveat: I have 2 encrypted partitions, and the boot
sequence asks me passwords 3 times:
- 1 to mount / in order to load the kernel (this one is done with US
keyboard!)
- 2 to mount / with the loaded kernel (using the right keyboard
configuration);
- 3 to mount /home.

There might be a way to configure the early decrypting of / to use the
right keyboard configuration, but I just added the LUKS key twice: once
with my normal keyboard layout, and once with the US keyboard layout.

In the mean time I am in the process of doing basically the same steps
for my server, except now I have a template for the system config so I
don't need to run the installer anymore.

Anyway, that was my story. It was a little messy, but in the end it
appears to work well.

Best regards,

divoplade

Re: My experience installing Guix system

[Ekaitz Zarraga]

Hi,
Thanks for sharing it, it's very interesting to see your experience because it's very near to mine, even if my setup was much simpler.

>     It was a little messy, but in the end it
>     appears to work well.

This is mostly my experience with guix. Good summary.

We have to work more on reducing the mess, because the rest of it works acceptably well and the messy part is quite annoying.

Best,
Ekaitz