install experience

[Thomas Danckaert <post@thomasdanckaert.be>]

Hi Guix-devel,

Yesterday, I finally installed GuixSD on my laptop “natively”.  Thanks
to jmd and iyzsong who gave me some advice on #guix.  Overall, it went
well, didn't take long, and was quite straightforward thanks to the
clear documentation.  Just in case it's useful, here's a short account
of my stumbling through the installation:

  - I had a false start because on my first attempt, I did not have a
    BIOS boot partition (there was still an EFI system partition,
    originally from a past windows installation, I think), so the 
final
    step of the installation, installing grub, failed. 宋文武 already
    submitted a patch to point out this requirement in the docs.

  - During this first attempt, which would ultimately fail for the
    above reason, I also got an error running “herd start cow-store
    /mnt”.  The message was:

     “ERROR. in procedure mount: mount "./rw-store" on "/gnu/store": 
invalid
     argument”

    I decided to reboot and try again, but got the same message.
    However, when running guix system reconfigure, the store in
    /mnt/gnu/store did get populated (which is the point of cow-store,
    as I understand it), so perhaps this error was not fatal...

    On my second attempt (then with the correct boot partition), I did
    not get this error anymore.  So I have no further information, I'm
    afraid.  The only difference that I'm aware of between both
    attempts, was the partitioning scheme (2nd attempt added the BIOS
    boot partition, and removed a few unnecessary partitions).

  - I followed advice I thought I'd once read somewhere (though not in
    the manual), and first installed a basic system with the 
bare-bones
    config from

https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Using-the-Configuration-System.html#Using-the-Configuration-System,

     and then switched to a full desktop environment after booting 
into
     the newly installed system for the first time (perhaps I
     could/should have just used a full desktop rightaway?).  I had
     used the wireless during installation, but didn't include
     wpa_supplicant (and whatever else might be needed to get similar
     wifi support as the installation image) in my system
     configuration, so I couldn't use wireless anymore after booting
     into my new system :-) Therefore, I had to walk over to my router
     and connect by cable to continue (at least that was the solution 
I
     came up with).

  - When I tried to login as non-root user for the first time, my home
    directory was not there, and I was sent back to the login screen. 
 I
    logged in as root and created/chown'ed the home directory myself.
    Unfortunately, I have no further information here, either.

Now, the system works fine, though I'll try to tweak it for better
touchpad support, graphics acceleration (I'm gnome3 is currently
unusable) and sharper fonts.  Those things worked better when it was
running Ubuntu, though I suspect some of that was due to non-free
driver blobs etc.

Thomas