How can I install gnu guix to a usb flashdrive to run as a live system?

How can I install gnu guix to a usb flashdrive to run as a live system?

[Greg Davidson]

I would like to install GNU Guix to a USB Flashdrive to run as a self-contained
live system.

I'm imagining that someone has figured out a good way to do this and
would appreciate someone pointing me to any existing discussion of this.

Flashdrives now available with more than 1 TB so a very complete working
environment should be possible.

I'm interested in doing this on both older laptops and recent laptops, which
I know impacts drive labeling and bootstrap installation issues.

Thanks, _Greg

Re: How can I install gnu guix to a usb flashdrive to run as a live system?

[Tobias Geerinckx-Rice]

Hi Greg,

I've seen different definitions of 'live system', so:

How does the system you want differ from a regular

  # guix system init system.scm /my/usb/drive

?

One clear way is that AFAIR there's no documented way (yet) to pass '--removable' to grub-install, so you'll have to manually rename  the grub.efi to bootx64.efi.  Annoying but doable.

By 'older and newer laptops', do you mean that you expect Guix to install and maintain both a UEFI and a BIOS GRUB at once?  I don't think multiple bootloaders are easy to configure (yet) in Guix, but this too should be possible to support.

There's also the 'read-only OS image' definition of live system, as created by

  # guix system image -t iso9660 system.scm

used to create the Guix System installer.  Unless you declare, e.g., a writable /home partition, all changes will be lost on reboot.

My guess is that's not what you want and it's not 'self-contained' in that it can't update itself.

Kind regards,

T G-R

Sent on the go.  Excuse or enjoy my brevity.

Re: How can I install gnu guix to a usb flashdrive to run as a live system?

[白い熊]

2022/05/11 13:07:33 Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <me@tobias.gr>:

>   # guix system init system.scm /my/usb/drive
>
> ?
>
> One clear way is that AFAIR there's no documented way (yet) to pass 
> '--removable' to grub-install, so you'll have to manually rename  the 
> grub.efi to bootx64.efi.  Annoying but doable.

I think the question here is more along the lines or him do you specify 
the bootloader in system config for this USB?

Do you put:

(bootloader (bootloader-configuration
           (bootloader grub-efi-bootloader)
           (targets (list "/boot/efi"))

... and manually copy the PC's /boot/efi to the USB or create a first 
partition on the USB for this?

This isn't exactly portable then – to make it boot another PC, is it? But 
if you don't have the efi directory, then it complains.

Or do you use the legacy GRUB bootloader configuration? This is what I 
did on a much older version of Guix a long time ago, and it worked – I 
really had a bootable Guix System USB that I could boot off in many PCs. 
But I forgot the exact specification of the system.scm and can't get it 
to work now…

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