Running graphical install inside existing Guix System

Running graphical install inside existing Guix System

[Ben Sturmfels]

Hi Folks,

I have an existing Guix System running on my laptop and would like to 
install Guix System onto a brand new larger hard drive, connected by a 
USB-to-SATA cable.

Could it be possible to run the graphical installer from within my 
existing Guix System to partition and install onto the new drive rather 
than messing around with a bootable USB and rebooting?

I realise there's lower-level tools like "guix system init" you could 
use if you were happy to partition and format the new drive manually, 
but it would be such a great user experience to leverage the existing 
graphical installer from withing Guix System.

Regards,
Ben

Re: Running graphical install inside existing Guix System

[Mathieu Othacehe]

Hello Ben,

> I realise there's lower-level tools like "guix system init" you could use if
> you were happy to partition and format the new drive manually, but it would be
> such a great user experience to leverage the existing graphical installer from
> withing Guix System.

The graphical installer relies on some services such as kmscon to change
the keyboard layout and connman to connect to the internet for
instance. If we were to add a "guix install" command, then we would need
to make sure that we run in the same environment as the one described in
"gnu/system/install.scm". I agree that it would be an interesting
feature for your use-case or to perform some quick tests on the
installer.

In the meantime, you can start a VM running the installer and using your
target drive but that wouldn't be a much better solution than rebooting
on a flash drive I guess.

Thanks,

Mathieu