Re: Guix on a Dell XPS 13 DE - 9350

[Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 12:12:58AM +0200, Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> There were some hurdles I had to get over so sharing my experiences
> here.
> 
> The XPS ships with Ubuntu 14.04, but uses UEFI boot and GPT disk.
> In the bios I selected "legacy" boot and used gdisk (from gptfdisk,
> see patch below) to change it to MBR.
> 
> The SSD uses the NVMe protocol, which means I needed to include that
> module in the initial ramdisk (patch below).  Grub 2.0 cannot handle
> NVMe devices and needs a patch from 2014.  I decided to use
> grub-2.02~beta3 (patch below...using a custom url because guix does
> not like the ~).
> 
> I expect we want to include probably patches #1 and #2, we may want
> to cherry pick the patch...not sure.
> 
> Greetings,
> Jan
> 

> +(define-public gptfdisk

[...]

> +      ;; (patches
> +      ;;  (search-patches "gdisk.patch"))

Leftover?

> +       ("util-linux" ,util-linux)))

What part of util-linux is used? Since it's a grab-bag of miscellaneous
utilities, it's nice to say in a comment what part is used. Or, if it's
just one component, to use that component as the name. For examples, see
btrfs-progs or ntfs-3g.

> +         (replace 'install

Can you leave a comment saying "No 'install' target", if that's
accurate? Or explain why we replace the install phase.

> * gnu/system/linux-initrd.scm (base-initrd): Add nvme to linux-modules.

Sounds like a good addition.

> * gnu/packages/grub.scm (grub): Change version no 2.02.beta3, use
> custom url symlinked to 2.02~beta3.

We should fix the problem that requires this workaround :)