New Install

New Install

[Richard]

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Firstly apologies if this is the wrong place to ask support/general questions; please send me elsewhere if need be.
I have just stumbled across guixsd and am looking forward to installing it this weekend. Before I do so, two things leap to mind.
- It is feasible/straightforward to install guixsd to a spare partition without affecting the existing OS (slackware) on my machine? (My other machine is burdened with Windows and dual-booting that is a challenge which might follow later...)?
- If so, is it feasible to install guixsd while keeping my existing extlinux-based boot system or am I obliged to move to grub?
Many thanks, Richard.

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Re: New Install

[Andy Wingo]

Hi!

On Thu 17 Sep 2015 14:06, Richard <r_j_humphreys@yahoo.co.uk> writes:

> - It is feasible/straightforward to install guixsd to a spare partition
> without affecting the existing OS (slackware) on my machine? (My other
> machine is burdened with Windows and dual-booting that is a challenge
> which might follow later...)?

It is, if you want to share /home but not not /etc, /var, and so on.
So if your slackware install is on sda1, your home is sda2, and you
install GuixSD to sda3 -- that can work.  Don't install over sda1
though.

> - If so, is it feasible to install guixsd while keeping my existing
> extlinux-based boot system or am I obliged to move to grub?

In practice you'd be obliged to move to grub.

Are you running Guix already?  If not, I would suggest trying Guix as a
user first.  As a user you get most of what GuixSD offers, without
perturbing your system.  The only downside is when you expect to
e.g. see package foo from Guix but you had it installed via slackware
and there's something wrong with your Guix setup so you aren't picking
up the Guix copy but you don't know why -- this sort of thing is only
possible to ultimately clear up if you have nothing in /usr.  But it can
be worked around and when everything is set up right you won't have this
problem.

Andy

Re: New Install

[Richard]

> From: Andy Wingo <wingo@igalia.com> 
> It is, if you want to share /home but not not /etc, /var, and so on. 

Sharing was never of interest - I just wanted to have the safety net of 
having another bootable OS. In the end I have decided to wipe Slackware 
and completely embrace the GNU... 

That leads to another question. What are appropriate partition sizes when 
using guix? From my brief reading it seems that guix will be storing lots 
of data below /gnu/store. For Slackware I just use a 5GB root partition 
and have never needed more. Should I infer that guix will be more greedy 
for disk space? 

> 
> In practice you'd be obliged to move to grub. 

Fair enough. May I suggest that at some point (many, many months from now) 
it might be worth re-visiting that idea? I expect that I am not the only 
user who might consider multibooting and who has an established boot
system. 


Again, many thanks, Richard.

Re: New Install

[Ludovic Courtès]

Richard <r_j_humphreys@yahoo.co.uk> skribis:

>> From: Andy Wingo <wingo@igalia.com> 
>> It is, if you want to share /home but not not /etc, /var, and so on. 
>
> Sharing was never of interest - I just wanted to have the safety net of 
> having another bootable OS. In the end I have decided to wipe Slackware 
> and completely embrace the GNU... 

Well, welcome then.  ;-)

Depending on what safety net one is after, it’s possible to either using
Guix on another distro, or use GuixSD with binaries from the previous
distro still available on the root file system (GuixSD overwrites
/bin/sh but leaves /usr and the rest of /bin untouched.)

> That leads to another question. What are appropriate partition sizes when 
> using guix? From my brief reading it seems that guix will be storing lots 
> of data below /gnu/store. For Slackware I just use a 5GB root partition 
> and have never needed more. Should I infer that guix will be more greedy 
> for disk space? 

Currently Guix is definitely more greedy than Debian, for instance,
which has all these tiny binary packages made from a single source
package.  It may be more greedy than Slackware, so it may be best to
have more than 5 GiB.

>> In practice you'd be obliged to move to grub. 
>
> Fair enough. May I suggest that at some point (many, many months from now) 
> it might be worth re-visiting that idea? I expect that I am not the only 
> user who might consider multibooting and who has an established boot
> system. 

The main difficulty here is that the GRUB config file that GuixSD
generates typically include references to files under /gnu/store, and
one wouldn’t want to maintain that by hand.

The other thing is that the GRUB menu generated by GuixSD includes
pointers to previous generations of the OS, which allows users to roll
back if needed (a convenient safety net.)

Thanks,
Ludo’.

Re: New Install

[Alex Kost]

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Ludovic Courtès (2015-09-18 22:25 +0300) wrote:

> Richard <r_j_humphreys@yahoo.co.uk> skribis:
[...]
>> Fair enough. May I suggest that at some point (many, many months from now)
>> it might be worth re-visiting that idea? I expect that I am not the only
>> user who might consider multibooting and who has an established boot
>> system.
>
> The main difficulty here is that the GRUB config file that GuixSD
> generates typically include references to files under /gnu/store, and
> one wouldn’t want to maintain that by hand.

I maintain my grub.cfg by hand (so I always use "guix system --no-grub …").
But it is not necessary to point to /gnu/store, because there is
"/var/guix/profiles/system/" which contains all necessary links to the
store.  So a grub entry for booting GuixSD may look like this (assuming
that 'guix' is the label of the partition with GuixSD):

menuentry GuixSD {
    search --label --set=root guix
    linux /var/guix/profiles/system/kernel/bzImage --root=guix --system=/var/guix/profiles/system --load=/var/guix/profiles/system/boot
    initrd /var/guix/profiles/system/initrd
}

If someone is interested, here is the relevant part of my grub.cfg with
several GuixSD entries:


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function boot_guix {
    search --no-floppy --label --set guix
    linux  ${guix_system}/kernel/bzImage --root=guix --system=${guix_system} --load=${guix_system}/boot
    initrd ${guix_system}/initrd
}

menuentry 'GuixSD (current)' --id guix --class guix --class gnu-linux --class os {
    set guix_system=/var/guix/profiles/system
    boot_guix
}
menuentry 'GuixSD (stable)' --class guix --class gnu-linux --class os {
    set guix_system=/var/guix/profiles/system-18-link
    boot_guix
}
menuentry 'GuixSD (testing)' --class guix --class gnu-linux --class os {
    set guix_system=/gnu/store/2592rnmais3d51bycm64wx46dgrb1cr5-system
    boot_guix
}