Re: System installation from a USB stick

[Adam Pribyl <pribyl@lowlevel.cz>]

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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)


>  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.)


>  3. Write an OS configuration file, say, config.scm (the image only has
>     GNU Zile as the editor.)  A minimal config looks like this:
>
>       (use-modules (gnu) (gnu system grub))
>
>       (operating-system
>         (host-name "foo")
>         (timezone "Europe/Paris")
>         (locale "en_US.UTF-8")
>         (bootloader (grub-configuration (device "/dev/sdX")))
>         (file-systems
>           (list (file-system
>                   (device "/dev/sdX1")
>                   (mount-point "/")
>                   (type "ext4")))))
>

C-x C-c save yes

>   4. Mount the target root file system as /mnt, say.
>
>   5. Run ‘guix system init config.scm /mnt’ (add ‘--no-grub’ if you
>      don’t want to install GRUB.)
>
>   6. Unmount /mnt, reboot, and cross fingers.
>
> Still, I would very much like feedback about actual attempts to use
> that, about the general procedure, or anything else.

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?). 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...

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.


> 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.

Regards


Adam Pribyl