Re: Dualbooting with guixsd not handling grub installation

[Jelle Licht <jlicht@fsfe.org>]

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2017-12-10 0:35 GMT+01:00 Martin Castillo <castilma@uni-bremen.de>:

> Hi guixers,
>
> I want to dualboot into GuixSD. My main os is currently NixOS.
> Currently, I don't want to let guixsd control my grub setup. So my
> situation is similar to [1].
>
> One solution is to use the unreliable chainloading with blocklists by
> invoking grub-install --force /dev/sda3 after every guix system
> reconfigure config.scm. (The config.scm has sda3 as grub target.)
>
> The second (and IMHO the right) solution I am aware of is adding the
> following in the grub.cfg which is handled by nix:
>    menuentry "GuixSD - Configloader" {
>      configfile (hd0,gpt3)/boot/grub/grub.cfg
>    }
>
> This way, grub loads the newest grub config file created from GuixSD.
> There is only a minor annoyance:
> guix system reconfigure config.scm returns non-zero and spits out an
> error (because grub-install wants --force to use blocklists). But it
> succeeds in everything else, especially in creating a new
> /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
> The alternative (guix system reconfigure --no-bootloader config.scm)
> doesn't update /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
> I'd like to have a way to have /boot/grub/grub.cfg updated without
> reinstalling grub on the disk/partition and without having a command
> return non-zero.
>
> This could be done by adding a cli argument for reconfigure or allowing
> an empty string in (grub-configuration (target "")).
>
> WDYT?
>
> Martin Castillo
>
>
> [1]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2014-12/msg00046.html
> --
> GPG: 7FDE 7190 2F73 2C50 236E  403D CC13 48F1 E644 08EC
>

This seems like a useful change. I am currently running into a similar issue
using GuixSD on a laptop /w libreboot, in a way similar to what is done at
[2].
Reading your email just now reminded me that living in mediocrity is
something that can be changed when you run only/mostly free software :-).

Maybe the orphaned patch at [3] can be ad{o,a}pted to address both of these
use-cases?

- Jelle

[2]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/2017-04/msg00083.html
[3]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-02/msg00116.html

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