Installation report

[Efraim Flashner <efraim@flashner.co.il>]

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I finally got all the pieces for my new desktop and went through the
Guix System installer (for the first time) and wanted to share how it
went.

I too got tricked by the ISO being xz compressed and at first wrote that
to my USB stick. After fixing that I was back to starting the installer.

I have an insatiable need to know what all the buttons do, so I first
booted into the firmware option, which did nothing for me (expectedly),
and I had to reboot.

After actually starting the install I changed over to TTY3 to format my
disk as btrfs so I could just pass it to the installer. I don't remember
most of the phases of the installer, but having read some of the bug
reports I'm happy to note that I forgot to plug in my ethernet cord
before booting but the network discovery didn't hang forever, it just
kept on complaining at me until the network was auto-discovered, so that
was a win.
I did end up using the partitioning from the installer since I forgot to
create an EFI partition, and I saw that btrfs was an option in the
installer.
My locale was set as en_IL.utf8 , which I left as-is, so we'll see if
that causes me random issues or not. I normally set it as en_US since
that's more of what's actually expected by most software. So far no
problems on that.
I'm not sure what the point of the tor-service being available in the
installer is, but I added it since I was going to keep it anyway.

I ended up with a very usable system with GDM and enlightenment desktop.
It also left me considering if we should add xterm to the default
installed packages or if it should be added to enlightenment, but I was
left without a terminal after install and had to switch to TTY1 to
install packages.

For the purposes of bragging I've included the neofetch of my old
desktop and my new desktop (I stole the GPU from my old machine for my
new one):

(ins)efraim@E5400 ~$ guix environment --ad-hoc neofetch -- neofetch
 ..                             `.   efraim@E5400
 `--..```..`           `..```..--`   ------------
   .-:///-:::.       `-:::///:-.     OS: Guix System x86_64
      ````.:::`     `:::.````        Host: 7304A54 ThinkCentre M58e
           -//:`    -::-             Kernel: 5.4.84-gnu
            ://:   -::-              Uptime: 58 secs
            `///- .:::`              Packages: 63 (guix-system), 89 (guix-user)
             -+++-:::.               Shell: bash 5.0.16
              :+/:::-                Terminal: /dev/pts/0
              `-....`                CPU: Pentium E5400 (2) @ 1.209GHz
                                     GPU: Intel 4 Series Chipset
                                     Memory: 394MiB / 3809MiB

(ins)efraim@3900XT ~$ guix environment --ad-hoc neofetch -- neofetch
 ..                             `.   efraim@3900XT
 `--..```..`           `..```..--`   -------------
   .-:///-:::.       `-:::///:-.     OS: Guix System x86_64
      ````.:::`     `:::.````        Host: B550 AORUS ELITE
           -//:`    -::-             Kernel: 5.10.2-gnu
            ://:   -::-              Uptime: 18 hours, 34 mins
            `///- .:::`              Packages: 60 (guix-system), 89 (guix-user)
             -+++-:::.               Shell: bash 5.0.16
              :+/:::-                Resolution: 1920x1080
              `-....`                DE: Enlightenment
                                     Terminal: terminology
                                     CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT (24) @ 3.800GHz
                                     GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 710
                                     Memory: 3314MiB / 64308MiB



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Efraim Flashner   <efraim@flashner.co.il>   אפרים פלשנר
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