Installation-Protocol for GuixSD x86_64 v0.15-preview

[Björn Höfling]

Hi people,

as Ludo "requested", today I freshly installed GuixSD in a QEMU
environment (x86_64 on both host and virtual env) to check the
installation process of the upcoming release.

Overall result: Yes, it worked, no big trouble! There are some things I
noticed I want to share here. I know you all do a good job here, so
take this just as observations. Whoever has the time might take one. And
I'm really picky when I should test something :-)

Starting point/environment Guix from git, being on commit:

6e65eb3cad1d1148eade9ed2228cdea90d531a94
From: Mon Jul 2 00:08:54 2018 +0200

Being on Ubuntu, having Qemu from Ubuntu.

Preparation of installation image went quick and without problems.
Booting it up was also no problem.

Here are my points :

1) Manual/Installing GuixSD in a VM:
https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/guix.html#Installing-GuixSD-in-a-VM

It's telling to start the VM like:

qemu-system-x86_64 -m 1024 -smp 1 \
  -net user -net nic,model=virtio -boot menu=on \
  -drive file=guixsd-install-0.14.0.system.iso \
  -drive file=guixsd.img

I prefered writing the disk like this:

 -drive readonly,media=cdrom,\
file=/gnu/store/70p7140n5igrqsfl989cxfzx6q3czc9a-image.iso

In that way, I can use the RO store entry and QEMU will not complain
about not being able to write to. Should we update the manual?

2) The welcome screen with installation instructions is a bit
cluttered. I had in mind that Danny already worked on this? There might
be some interesting things in case of fatal errors. But this is not very
nice for new users who can't read the instructions between the lines:

It's something like that:

```
You have been warned ...
[8.47... ] shephard[1]: Service console-font-tty1 has been started.
... Service term-tty2 has been started.
..
PIO_UNIMAPCLR: Input/output error
address@hidden ~# [...]
error in finalization thread: Bad file descriptor
[49.] random: crng init done
[49]  random: 4 urandom warning(s) missed due to ratelimiting

```

3) PIO_UNIMAPCLR: Input/output error

Anything to worry about?

3a) POSITIVE: Colors work. GPM works. Alt-F2, Docu works.

4) Network setup. Then: `ping -c gnu.org`

That did not work. It took me a while to realize that DNS worked but
ping not. Probably due to QEMU NAT?

I tried instead wget or curl. But both are not there. Do we have
"HTTP client" tools in the installer package to test the network this
way? Or is this too heavy in size for the installer? Do we have
anything else to give the user at it's hand besides ping?

5) I think the partition part in the manual is quite confusing. For me,
it's not clear what's the difference between DOS and this other
partitioning scheme. Which one should I choose in which situation [OK,
is this something GuixSD has to care about? I think at least a bit]?

Anyway, I continued with a DOS, one partition, no swap.

6) Editors: When it comes about editing the standard config, there are
three editors mentioned: zile, nano, nvi. The first ones are fired up as
named, for "nvi" the command is "vi". This is not obvious for everyone.

7) Zile/Umlauts problem:
I wantet do write "Björn" as my user comment in the config but I
couldn't.
Althogh I did `loadkeys de-latin1` and could write umlauts on the
shell, within Zile I get this error:

<b6> is undefined

7a) GOOD: guix system init took only 10 minutes. Where's my break?

8) No keymap in new system:

One of the first steps in the installation is to load the keymaps. But
when I reboot into the newly system, I'm left with the default
US-keyboard again. Luckily root has no password yet. Nobody mentioned I
should set that up in my configuration, no example in the configuration
file [I used the plain one].

8a) GOOD: That title 'label thing is no longer in the config, although
it is still mentioned on the homepage docs [Needs to be updated]

9) Old guix version:

Being in the newly booted system:

 which guix:
--> /run/current-system/profile/bin/guix
  -> /gnu/store/111i...-guix-0.14.0-12.77a1aac/bin/guix

That commit 77a1aac is from 2018-06-09. Why so old?

After guix pull [quite fast!], I get it correctly from ~/.config/...

Ah, whait, a `which guix` is correctly pointing to there, and that is finally 
pointing to `/gnu/store/496...guix-6e65eb3a/bin/guix` But guix --version 
reports still the old one ...

So why is there this guix-0.14.0-12.77a1aac from one month ago? After a
fresh installation, I want the newest Guix!

BTW: After reboot (I think a logout/in would have been sufficent), guix
--version reported the new commit-id.

10) Old kernel?

I'm pretty sure about that, but now a bit confused. Probably due to 9)?

Installation ISO welcomes with:

"GNU with Linux-Libre 4.17.3 (beta)"

After 'guix system init', I'm at 4.17.2 (Yes, I have this old generation in my 
GRUB startup screen).

Only after guix pull && guix system reconfigure I'm at 4.17.3 again.

So, if you start your system newly and don't do a guix pull directly ["This is 
so complicated, let's do that later..."], you are one kernel behind...

11) guix gc and locale confusion:

I configured my system with locale 'de_DE.utf8'. Note in Germany the comma 
(',') is used a a decimal separator. guix gc gives me at the end:

...
note: currently hard linking saves 206.08 MiB
guix gc: freed 91,50781 MiBs

The first line is written in English with a decimal point. The last line is 
written in English, although the decimal separator is German [Furthermore, It's 
more confusing to report the 0.00081 MiBs, i.e. about 80KiB saved space. 
Rounding should be done after 3 places].


12) ls | less

ls has a colored output. Nice.
ls | less has ugly escape sequences. Only ls --color=no | less works.


That's it for now.

Björn

pgpUKGmSHNHM0.pgp
Description: OpenPGP digital signature