Re: GuixSD qcow2 image for GNOME Boxes?

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 10:15:35PM -0500, Marc Dunivan wrote:
> Help Guix:
> 
> On http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guix/ there are a number of gnu-system-demo*.qcow2 images. However, the latest file was modified on 2014-04-09 and doesn't seem to open in GNOME Boxes.
> 
> I am hoping to use GNOME Boxes to explore GuixSD without installing it on my PenguinWee.
> 
> Are their instructions on how to create a GuixSD qcow2 image in the Guix webpages? Can one take the guix-usb-install-0.9.0.x86_64-linux.xz files and create an image that GNOME Boxes can use?

If you simply want to try out GuixSD without installing to bare metal,
there are a number of tools in `guix system` [0] that can do this for
you, although I don't know about using them with GNOME Boxes.

`guix system` can give you read-only and read-write QEMU images, raw
disk images suitable for a USB flash drive, and it can also launch the
system in a container. The disk-image tool is used to create the
guix-usb-install-0.9.0.x86_64-linux.xz file [1].

In each case, you'll need an operating system configuration as
introduced here:
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Using-the-Configuration-System.html#Using-the-Configuration-System

I hope that helps!

[0]
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Invoking-guix-system.html

[1] See section 7.1.5:
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/guix.html#System-Installation

> 
> 
> Respectfully,
> Marc