Hi Giovanni, May 27, 2022, 10:06 AM, "Giovanni Biscuolo" <g...@xelera.eu mailto:g...@xelera.eu?to=%22Giovanni%20Biscuolo%22%20%3Cg%40xelera.eu%3E > wrote:
> IMHO what you are trying to do is an interesting path to... ascension Ascension, that's a great way to put it! > For my desktop and laptop I'm still using Guix on top of a foreign > distro (Debian) because... I'm conservative :-D, so I'd very much like > to have a way to try to slowly switch to Guix System with the "safety > net" to be able to boot my current system if I'm in trouble; this way > also I can spare some cash avoiding to buy a new dedicated machine for > this experiments. > I plan to try it out in a VM first. The new Arch installer sets up btrfs subvolumes automatically so it will be good for testing. > I never tried this, but beware that the UID and GID of user(s) in > your new Guix System sould be the very same of the arch system to be > able to access homes, /including/ Guix profiles of users (stored in > /home/$USER...) Yes, I believe most Linuxes set the first created user to a UID and GID of 1000, so hopefully this is not an issue. > Important: if you want to be able to share the store between the two > systems you should also share the /status/ of Guix, stored in > LOCALSTATEDIR/guix/ (usually /var/guix), since it contains a lot of > useful data and AFAIU it must be kept in sync between the foreign distro > and the Guix System [1]. This is the most critical part about being > able to share Guix between two different host operating systems. Should I make /var/guix a subvolume as well? ALso the only directory in /gnu is /gnu/store right? So I could just have an @gnu subvolume mounted on /gnu instead of a @gnu-store subvolume mounted on /gnu/store? > Last but not least, once you have installed Guix System you have to > decide what manages your GRUB configuraton: Guix System or arch, you > cannot share the grub config between the two; Guix System have a > stateless GRUB config (and it' good and fair) so I suggest you to use it > for GRUB configuration, but if you decide to keep using arch this is a > good tip: https://yhetil.org/guix/20181031125428.GA814@doom/ Thanks for the tip. What if I install another bootloader on Arch like systemd boot? Then there will not be a bootloader conflict and I can select one with efibootmgr. May 28, 2022, 10:51 AM, "Giovanni Biscuolo" <g...@xelera.eu mailto:g...@xelera.eu?to=%22Giovanni%20Biscuolo%22%20%3Cg%40xelera.eu%3E > wrote: > Actually I'm using a shared store AND "LOCALSTATEDIR/guix/" (usually > /var/guix) between my host OS and all my LXC containers, it's something > I learned by adapting Ludo' and Ricardo notes on installing Guix on a > cluster; please see this message (it was Feb 2019, I forgot I wrote > that) for details and pointers to the relevant documentation: > > https://yhetil.org/guix/87h8d8dl6d....@roquette.mug.biscuolo.net/ > > In your case the "store and state sharing" systems are not running and > at the same time like on a cluster, but from a systemistic point of view > it's (almost) the same thing some of us are already doing in their > setup. Interesting, this does have some parallels. > As a side note, you could also consider to switch to Guix System and > keep your foreign distro running as an LXC container sharing store and > state with the host, but you have to be familiar with LXC tooling [1] > AND know how to "convert" a "physical" machine to an LXC container [2], > giving the guests acces to the host GPU [3] for graphical applications > or using remote dektop applications like SPICE or VNC... it's a little > bit complex but pure fun! Would an LXC approach require two graphics cards? I only have an integrated GPU. Thanks, kiasoc5
