Re: System installation from a USB stick

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Adam Pribyl <pribyl@lowlevel.cz> skribis:

> On Wed, 23 Jul 2014, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>
>> I’ve finally fixed this problem: <http://bugs.gnu.org/18061>.
>> Not perfect, since it requires users to type an extra command, but that
>> seems acceptable to me.
>>
>> I would very much appreciate new tests and feedback.  Here’s a new image
>> with this fix:
>>
>>  http://www.fdn.fr/~lcourtes/software/guix/gnu-usb-install-20140723.x86_64.xz
>>  http://www.fdn.fr/~lcourtes/software/guix/gnu-usb-install-20140723.x86_64.xz.asc
>>  SHA1: 7d277ed9a0927fd08e211125eca9a8bea98e7c3e
>>
>> (For 32-bit, you can rebuild it with the usual command.)
>
> Installation went fine.
>
> I can not boot installed system, boot looks for /dev/sda1 which is not
> present. It smells to me like the same problem with devtmpfs
> previously in live USB... I found in grub the reference to /dev/sda1
> (as LiveUSB now with udev in devtmpfs and kernel 3.15.6 asigns the HDD
> /dev/sda) but it looks like the kernel booting from HDD is not seeing
> it like this.

The system tries to mount whatever was specified in the ‘file-system’
declaration for "/".  Perhaps you should use a label instead of the
actual device name?  As in:

  (file-system
    (mount-point "/")
    (device "root")
    (title 'label)
    ...)

The GRUB menu will use that as well.

(If the root file system already has a label, you can try that easily by
just editing the GRUB config from GRUB to use, say, --root=my-label.)

> Notes:
> - Installed system has kernel 3.15.5 and guix 0.6 while the liveUSB
> has kernel 3.15.6 and guix 0.7
>
> - The help file on tty2 needs to be updated to accomodate the info
> about cow-store

Yes, that’s the result of the ‘guix’ package (in the distro) being
older.  I’ll update it.

> - I would vote for the basic config.scm to be present on the USB
> somewhere, it is time consuming to rewrite one from help to the
> file. (Could be I may copy it somehow from info page, but I would need
> a help how to do that.)

Yes, I agree it’d be useful.  I’ll see how this can be achieved.

> - Time synchro or at least hwclock --hctosys would be fine as
> everything is installed 1.1.1970

It’s normal that everything in the store has zeroed timestamps.  That’s
one of the things that support determinism.

> - My boot is somewhat long due to missing firmware for a Radeon
> graphics card and "fatal error during GPU init". This is probably due
> to linux-libre kernel. I am not sure if this could be mitigated
> somehow, generally is not a problem.

Yeah, no idea, but I suspect it’s indeed beyond the scope of Guix.  ;-)

Ludo’.