Re: System installation from a USB stick

[Adam Pribyl <pribyl@lowlevel.cz>]

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On Mon, 21 Jul 2014, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

> Adam Pribyl <pribyl@lowlevel.cz> skribis:
>
>> Kernel in dmesg identifies the device like /dev/sdf, doing
>> mknod /dev/sdf b 8 80; mknod /dev/sdf1 b 8 81; mount /dev/sdf1 /mnt
>> solves the problem. So definitely the drive is at sdf. It looks to me
>> like there is some built in limit in udev for number of "scsi" devices
>> in this case or something.
>
> Hmm, I have no idea.  We’re using a relatively old version of udev,
> maybe that will be solved when upgrading.
>
>>>> as there is only 1GB of RAM and it seems the install fetches too much
>>>> packages into ramdisk. Why is it not using the target file system
>>>> already?
>>>
>>> Hmm, it’s actually initially populating the local store, on the RAM
>>> disk, right.  I agree that’s a problem we should address.
>>>
>>> However, most stuff are already in the store, unless the configuration
>>> being built uses many more packages, or use Xorg and related stuff.  Is
>>> it what’s happening?
>>
>> The config.scm is as sugessted (just hostname and device modified):
>
> Hmm, OK.  I’m surprised that this requires downloading more than 1GiB of
> stuff.

It looks around 700MB comes from the USB image itself, another 700MB is to 
be downloaded. I only have 478MB free ram disk. Together the /gnu has then 
1.4GB roughtly.

> I’m looking at a fix, but that’s not as simple as I would have liked.

Maybe using the flash drive itself will serve better?

>> Nothing special. I tried to bind mount the /gnu to a target drive, the
>> download went OK (cca 1.4G) but then led to different kind of failure.
>
> I’d be interested in knowing about that one as well.  :-)
>

this involved
mount /dev/sdf1 /mnt/
cp -a /gnu /mnt/
mount -o bind /mnt/gnu /gnu
from now on, the target /mnt/gnu is filling up during guix system init.

it ends up with

initializing operating system under "/mnt"
copying '/gnu......glibc-2.19.locales'...
2035 operations
Bus error

Thats it, the installation is not complete, there is just /gnu on target 
drive.

> Thanks,
> Ludo’.

Adam Pribyl