From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic =?utf-8?Q?Court=C3=A8s?=) Subject: Re: guix system disk-image: preset user profiles (packages & arbitrary data) Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2018 13:35:04 +0200 Message-ID: <87muvh6as7.fsf@gnu.org> References: <871scxb7gc.fsf@gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:34006) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1fXmFa-0006PW-At for help-guix@gnu.org; Tue, 26 Jun 2018 07:35:11 -0400 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1fXmFX-000599-6d for help-guix@gnu.org; Tue, 26 Jun 2018 07:35:10 -0400 In-Reply-To: <871scxb7gc.fsf@gmail.com> (Pierre Neidhardt's message of "Sat, 23 Jun 2018 21:58:59 +0200") List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: help-guix-bounces+gcggh-help-guix=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "Help-Guix" To: Pierre Neidhardt Cc: help-guix Hello Pierre, Pierre Neidhardt skribis: > I'd like to built a live disk-image for a USB stick I carry around with > me. Booting it would result in the exact configuration I have on my > machine. FWIW I did that a year or two ago with hacky modifications to the code. It would be nice to make it accessible through the command-line interface and API. > I'm also wondering now if the USB stick is writable. That would solve > it then. As you found out, =E2=80=98disk-image=E2=80=99 creates a =E2=80=9Cvolatile= =E2=80=9D image, where the root file system is mounted read-only, with a writable overlayfs on top of it. The main use case for this is the installation image where you want to make sure you=E2=80=99re not going to modify what=E2=80=99s on the = USB disk. There are two things we could do: =E2=80=A2 Add an option to make the root file system persistent (easy). =E2=80=A2 Add an option to allow users to specify additional partitions i= n the disk image (which would be writable). If you look at =E2=80=98qemu-ima= ge=E2=80=99 in (gnu system vm), you=E2=80=99ll see there=E2=80=99s already a list o= f partitions there, and this is what needs to be modified. My preference goes to the second option; it=E2=80=99s a bit more work, but = it=E2=80=99s not too hard. HTH! Ludo=E2=80=99.