Re: gnu-system-demo feedback

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi, Walter,

Walter Franzini <walter.franzini@gmail.com> skribis:

> being curious about guix I've tried to use the gnu-system-demo image and
> I've found some difficulties:
>
> 1. how to shutdown the system?

Why would one do such a thing?  ;-)

There’s currently no ‘shutdown’ command, because dmd (the init system)
doesn’t have one yet.  Its support for run levels is preliminary.
Adding good support for that is the next thing to do.  See
<http://www.gnu.org/software/dmd/manual/dmd.html#Runlevel-evolution> for
more info.

> 2. guix pull fails - already reported by someone else

Yes, that’s now fixed, but the version in the image is broken.

> 3. running guix gc as root empties /etc (broken symlinks)
> 4. running guix gc as guest (!) empties /etc (broken symlinks)

A bug: I forgot to register them as GC roots (see gnu/system/vm.scm.)

> 5. df fails with the following message
>    df: cannot read table of mounted file systems.  No such file or directory

I believe that’s because /etc/mtab is missing.

> I'm missing something?
> Can someone point me to relevant information?

I don’t think you’re missing anything, except that this was preliminary
work.  All this clearly needs to be ironed out, and that will be part of
the focus for the next releases.

The areas where help is appreciated are the system-wide configuration
instantiation tools (the gnu/system/*.scm modules), and dmd
(http://www.gnu.org/software/dmd/).  dmd is quite small, which makes it
easy to get started with it, I think.

Thanks for your feedback,
Ludo’.