Hi Andreas, > I am reading it only now (since I wish to install GuixSD on an ARM board > of mine, but better late than never...). Very nice work and write-up!
Thank you :) > But I still have a few questions: > - Now that there is a release 0.14, could the images not be made available > on the website? I just saw that Danny proposed a patch about it! > - In my case, I own an Olimex Lime 1. I think that this might correspond > to a20-olinuxino-micro-installation-os. Whatever it is, it does not have > integrated memory, but needs to run directly from the micro SD card. > So how do I install it, since I cannot boot from one medium and install > easily to another one? Should I attach an SD card reader to install onto > a second SD card, then boot from that in a second step? I guess you can do like I did in "Preparing a dedicated system configuration" section of the article. That means preparing a config.scm that suits your needs, run a "guix system disk-image --system=armhf-linux config.scm" and dd the image obtained on a SD card. There is no "installation image" per-se, you build the system that you'll directly use once booted. > Would it not make sense to provide not installation images, but installed > images? These could be used to directly boot the machines, and then instead > of doing "guix system init", one should be able to do a "guix system > reconfigure". To develop a bit more, the two-step installation (first > creating a disk image, then installing onto the hard drive) could be seen > as an artefact of installing on bigger machines with their more complicated > setting using grub, and where taking out the hard disk and copying an image > with dd onto it is not so practical... Why should it not be easier to > directly boot the final GuixSD on an ARM machine? Unless I don't get you right, it's already working! You don't need to run "guix system init" like I said before. Once you booted the mpd server, you can reconfigure it to add a new package, there's no init involved. > Notice that the last section of the blog post does not solve the problem: > As I realised by trial and error when trying to use a disk-image for a > virtual machine, it really is only an installation-image, since user data > is stored in an overlay file system that is lost upon reboot. It's only true if your image is including "%installation-services" that provides "cow-store-service". That's why in the mpd.scm from the article the system is not inherited from beaglebone-black-installation-os. By starting from mpd.scm you should be able to write a system config that can boot and be used directly without any further installation step. > - Suggestion in that context: Rename "guix system disk-image" to "guix system > installation-image". Unless I'm wrong above, "guix system disk-image" is used to provide both "ready-to-use" images and "installation-images" (and possibly other kind of images too), so I don't think that would be a good idea. > Thank you again for the post, and I am looking forward to more instructions > for the other boards! > Thanks, I hope you will be able to produce a working GuixSD image for your target. Don't hesitate to ask other questions! Mathieu
