Re: System installation from a USB stick

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi,

Thanks for the report, it’s really appreciated!

Adam Pribyl <pribyl@lowlevel.cz> skribis:

> On Mon, 30 Jun 2014, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>
>> Hello!
>>
>> I’ve uploaded a USB installation image for x86_64 for testing:
>>
>>  http://www.fdn.fr/~lcourtes/software/guix/gnu-usb-install-20140629.x86_64.xz
>>  SHA1: d36e70d25b81b734fa9558a5446fabb96489ec3b
>>  (100 MiB)
>>
>> To install the system, you would:
>>
>>  1. Configure the network, by running ‘dhclient eth0’ for instance.
>>     Normally udev automatically loads device drivers (e.g., my laptop
>>     uses e1000e for Ethernet), but since it’s a small config kernel, it
>>     may miss drivers for your system, in which case you’re screwed.
>
>
> dhclient can't create /var/db/dhclient.leases (not fatal)

Right, this should be fixed with commit 3485716.

>>  2. Partition, format etc. the target drive; the image includes Parted,
>>     fdisk, and e2fsprogs.
>
>
> There is no mkfs.extX, how to format a partition and is it needed? (I
> used old one already formated.)

Indeed.  Fixed in b63dbd4.

> This is more a user feedback: After first start it tries to load "Old
> configuration" in a grub menu by default, that ends in a guile console
> ("old" tries to boot from USB right?).

“Old” should be empty until you upgrade to a new configuration with
‘guix system reconfigure’.  Then it fills up with links to previous
operating systems.

> Switching to linux-libre in Grub boots, but then requests for a group
> passwords start to appear with PAM auth error message. User is asked
> for way too many group passwords. I do not understand why. This
> repeats on every boot...

Ah yes, that was fixed with commit da417ff.

> IMHO: The number of error and warning messages like from udev or
> whatever (locales not installed) during boot should go down before
> making this a public release.

Yeah.

I very much welcome help in that regard.  For instance, with the new
kernel config, udev starting complaining that /dev/ram* don’t exist;
this is harmless, but definitely annoying and not confidence-inspiring.

>> The image was built with
>>
>>  guix system disk-image gnu/system/install.scm --image-size=800MiB
>>
>> as of commit 1ddbd9f.
>>
>> Ludo’.
>
> Otherwise thanks for this achievemnt, the installation is really
> strightforward.

Thanks for the kind words.

If you have Guix installed on the distro you’re currently using, it
would be great if you could try rebuilding the image from master (as
shown above), and see what problems show up.

I’ve also improved documentation of all these things, under “GNU
Distribution.”

Thanks again,
Ludo’.