Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public12@thebird.nl> skribis:

> Well yes, you need to install all prerequisites and that is not always
> trivial. Try bootstrapping on an old Centos install, for example.
> Can't even get Docker going there.
>
> It would be nice to have an installable binary tar ball for Guix. Just
> unpack in root and go...

I’ve given that a try since it’s actually quite simple to do.  The
procedure in the attached file produces a self-contained tarball.  It
contains the closure of Guix, as well as /var/guix and an initial
/root/.guix-profile from which one can use the ‘guix’ commands.

I’ve uploaded the result (for x86_64) at:

  http://www.fdn.fr/~lcourtes/software/guix/guix-tarball-0.8.1.1140.tar.lz
  http://www.fdn.fr/~lcourtes/software/guix/guix-tarball-0.8.1.1140.tar.lz.sig
  SHA1: afde62b3e9f97f9ae0c57eaccfaca842b157cd2f

To install Guix on a foreign distro, follow these steps:

  1. Download the tarball (38 MiB.)

  2. As root, run:
       cd /
       tar xf /path/to/guix-tarball-0.8.1.1140.tar.lz
     You need lzip and GNU tar.

  3. Setup the daemon as explained in the manual, and run it from
     /root/.guix-profile/bin/guix-daemon.

And hopefully, that’s it.

I haven’t actually tried it, so feedback is welcome!  :-)

Thanks,
Ludo’.