Re: VM image: can we simplify its use?

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi Leo,

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> skribis:

> Originally I added the VM image to address a specific use case at one VM
> hoster. I had hoped it would catch on more than it did and that the VM
> image would be improved to avoid these manual steps.
>
> In the meantime, people are using the VM image just to try out Guix —
> for example, in a local QEMU instance.
>
> It doesn't give a great impression, so let's change it.

Agreed.

> We should offer something like a "Live Guix" image for people to try the
> full Guix system without installing anything, and this should be more
> fully-featured than the current Guix VM image.
>
> Let's replace the current VM image with this "Live Guix" thing for the
> next release :) Should we adopt 'desktop.tmpl' for this?

I think we could start from there.  With GNOME, that’d be 2+ GiB
probably, which is pretty big; otherwise we could come up with a lighter
setup, say SLiM + Xfce (+ IceCat?).

Thoughts?

> Eventually we should also offer a Guix system service that works like
> cloud-init [0] and can replace the manual work around networking,
> partitioning, etc. Help wanted!

It seems cloud-init is largely about running some sort of a YAMLish
shell script that runs commands to obtain the desired state in terms of
installed packages, system setup, and all that, right?  To some extent
that seems redundant with a typical OS declaration, no?

Thanks for your feedback!

Ludo’.