Re: Hosting a GuixSD server on commodity hosting platforms, a journey

[Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>]

Christopher Baines writes:

> On 02/12/16 04:06, Christopher Allan Webber wrote:
>> Except, oops!  This won't boot.  We need to put GRUB on it.
>>
>> Well here's where I'm stuck for tonight.  I don't know exactly what's
>> needed; maybe either the -b flag, or --grub2-mbr, or some combination.
>> The man page is a little bit overwhelming (I mean, xorrisofs is clearly
>> featureful, credit there):
>>
>>   https://www.gnu.org/software/xorriso/man_1_xorrisofs.html
>>
>> But how do I generate the right GRUB stuff to put there?  Can I pull it
>> off the USB image?  Generate it separately?
>>
>> This web page is very long but appears to have the appropriate info (and
>> unfortunately requires running arbitrary javascript to even render):
>>
>>   http://lukeluo.blogspot.com/2013/06/grub-how-to-2-make-boot-able-iso-with.html
>>
>> ... so I guess the next steps are following roughly what's described at
>> the bottom of the page?
>>
>> I wonder how other distros do this step.
>
> Thanks for looking in to this Chris! I'm using Bytemark for personal 
> servers, and have tried and failed to install Guix from a Debian live 
> cd. But, they do support installing from arbitrary ISO images, this 
> would be great to get working.
>
> The bash script which I guess Nix uses looks quite short [1], you might 
> find some useful inspiration there.
>
> 1: 
> https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/nixos/lib/make-iso9660-image.sh

That looks VERY helpful, thank you!