GNU Guix General

gyoo-ix

If legit, how is work on arm coming? Any idea when theyll have official disk images for it? Dont really feel like building one myself, though if its not anytime soon i will.

You can set the packages to be built for arm, and there are some binary substitutes for it too.
You may just use your normal distro with the guix package manager on it to write a system config for arm the way you'd like it and make an iso from that config.
Then you just boot and all ready. Somebody else on the irc might know the specifics of it

Retard here. What is Guix, other than a Suika logo.

Hello! Take a look at the links attached!
but in short, it's a package manager that uses a lisp dialect, isolates packages, can install multiple versions, works on any gnu system and also has a distribution based around it and other GNU packages.

how do I start x

Oh, so it can work as a distro too, I'll try it.

hmm, i remember working around this with xinit before. Usually we recommend a display manager like slim and .xsession
I'll ask in the irc and will come back to you in a moment

We also give out pre-made qemu images! You don't need to install it baremetal the first time to test it.

Actually, since you seem willing to help, my main issue when I tried out guix was that I, in fact, couldn't run the command 'startx' succesfully. I installed most relevant X packages from the official guix package repository and still couldn't startx succesfully. Also, I ran the graphical installation without issue and chose ONLY i3wm when prompted to select a de-facto graphical desktop environment. I didn't try any of the other options.

I apologize if this isn't enough information to solve this issue but this is all I remember from my first experience with guix (pronounced as geeks)

It's because startx tries the usual path for Xorg and all. You gotta use xinit with an option. I'll have to take a look on my laptop again and see what that option is. Freenode is always open for helping too.
With NixOS and the Guix system these kind of issues are common, as they don't follow the usual filesystem hierarchy.
What i do is using Slim with a custom ~/.xsession

you guys should PR netboot.xyz to add guix to the list. all you need are the vmlinuz, initrd, and the kernel params. that's how i test out distros and provision all of my VMs
it's important to note that you can get xinitrc behaviour WITH A LOGIN MANAGER if you 'cp ~/.xinitrc ~/.xsession'. I consider it very useful

Tell me more about the netboot thing, i can't say i'm familiar with it.

Look up what PXE is and how it works. netboot.xyz is basically PXE over the public internet for open source OSes. You can even netboot FreeDOS.

Thanks. I'll take a look at it and see what i can do, it sure seems good for new users who want to test it.

it is good for new users, and also if you guys publish an appropriate initrd and kernel with the appropriate options it will incentivize actually using your shit in production. noone really wants to provision VMs manually, so as far as i can tell any distro that is going to be deployed at scale needs to have kickstart or some other unattended install system on top of a way to be loaded over PXE. if those requirements are satisfied, then you can get like 100s of ansible-ready machines spinning pretty fast.
coreOS's ignition is a good example of an unattended install system. you put a http/s url in a kernel option, the system autoconfigures from the config at that location. the config lists mounts, DNS servers, etcd secrets, and maybe most importantly trusted ssh keys

Makes sense. I'll send a mail to guix-devel

How to get nonfree wifi drivers

Done. If the thread is still alive by then, i'll keep you in touch.

it's on the OP's link list, i don't recommend you to do it tho.

Why not?

As a dev of a gnu project, i don't endorse nonfree software. As an end user, i had to get firmware for my gpu to write free software.
I understand the issue, and the user is still the victim here, i will never blame you for using nonfree software if it's necessary to actually use your hardware at all.
I share my nonfree repository, but avoid it if you can.
If there are any workarounds you can do, please try it first.

thank you. i am familiar with ipxe scripting and have a working setup, so if you guys publish the kernel and ramdisk i can do testing and submit a pr to netboot.xyz if you'd like, despite my nixos allegiances ;)
my github is 6AA4FD

can anyone explain what guix do please? is it something like NixOS but for any distro?

I tried to read tutorials but got very little

The tl;dr is that it doesn't break old software with updates because it preserves old versions of dependencies where necessary and can install new versions separately. You could fire up a Guix machine in ten years, update the packages, and it would not break anything. It has other merits, but this is the main breakthrough.

how does guix compare to nix usability wise? by "usability" i mean the ease of use and performance of command line tools, not "scheme vs DSL" autistic flame wars
from my experience nix command line tools are slow as fuck

For the next post put the official nonguix channel as it is more updated than guix-nonfree

gitlab.com/nonguix/nonguix

Interested in this too, I want to use the guix distro on a shitty machine where GDM takes ages to start on boot up. I also use it in a tty often before switching into an xorg session with 'startx'.