Re: Porting GuixSD to ARM article.

[Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr>]

Hello Mathieu,

On Fri, Dec 22, 2017 at 02:12:02PM +0100, Mathieu Othacehe wrote:
> A new article is available on Guix's website. It summarizes recent
> progress on ARM porting topic.

I am reading it only now (since I wish to install GuixSD on an ARM board
of mine, but better late than never...). Very nice work and write-up!

But I still have a few questions:
- Now that there is a release 0.14, could the images not be made available
  on the website?
- In my case, I own an Olimex Lime 1. I think that this might correspond
  to a20-olinuxino-micro-installation-os. Whatever it is, it does not have
  integrated memory, but needs to run directly from the micro SD card.
  So how do I install it, since I cannot boot from one medium and install
  easily to another one? Should I attach an SD card reader to install onto
  a second SD card, then boot from that in a second step?

  Would it not make sense to provide not installation images, but installed
  images? These could be used to directly boot the machines, and then instead
  of doing "guix system init", one should be able to do a "guix system
  reconfigure". To develop a bit more, the two-step installation (first
  creating a disk image, then installing onto the hard drive) could be seen
  as an artefact of installing on bigger machines with their more complicated
  setting using grub, and where taking out the hard disk and copying an image
  with dd onto it is not so practical... Why should it not be easier to
  directly boot the final GuixSD on an ARM machine?

  Notice that the last section of the blog post does not solve the problem:
  As I realised by trial and error when trying to use a disk-image for a
  virtual machine, it really is only an installation-image, since user data
  is stored in an overlay file system that is lost upon reboot.

- Suggestion in that context: Rename "guix system disk-image" to "guix system
  installation-image".

Thank you again for the post, and I am looking forward to more instructions
for the other boards!

Andreas