@jas @josch

Have not tested booting #GuixSystem yet, but... probably?

That is my near-term goal, anyways...

Configuring #GuixSystem reminds me of configuring #Emacs, and not only because of the lisp parenthesis soup*.

The similarity goes deeper than the configuration syntax. They both make me constantly question whether I should pin down and declare every last bit of configuration explicitly, or only customize what I need and implicitly use the defaults for everything else. Sometimes I find it very difficult to resolve this tension. But I will try to remain pragmatic and only customize what I need. I need a working system more than a perfect system. And I want to spend more time using said system than configuring it (even though it is pretty fun to run reconfigure commands and see new things right away! it's good to use small hardware that makes these reconfigure operations long and noisy, otherwise I could play with this all night...).

*: Said with all due respect! I actually find this notation convenient when indented/formatted nicely, which Emacs does very well of course.

So, as I learn more about #Guix and #GuixSystem, I started to read other people's configurations. This is helpful because it puts the snippets from the documentation in context, and it is easier to see the big picture this way.

But some of the configurations I read are much more than customization from the code provided by the documentation. They look more like full programs, organized in modules, with their own custom syntax, etc. So I started reading the documentation of #Guile, to understand the code I'm reading a bit better.

The most helpful read so far is the style guide linked from the Guix documentation. It explains some naming conventions like the names ending with a question mark, a star, etc. I had somewhat guessed from context what these symbols mean, but it's helpful to find these naming conventions explained somewhere.

One convention that remains unexplained is the % sign in front of some variable names like %base-services, %desktop-services, %default-channels, etc. The trend seems to be that the % sign denotes system-wide defaults. Is this correct? Or does % indicate something else?

I don't remember what state my #GuixSystem was in exactly when I first tried to connect to it by ssh the first time and it didn't work. But after a full update, a reconfigure, and a reboot, it works fine. Still can't seem to get X11 forwarding to function, but I suspect this is a problem on the Mac laptop's side (it used to work though... will have to look into this).

Now I am mostly done with the system configuration (maybe some minor tweaks will be necessary as I make progress reading the documentation) and started porting my home configuration to 'guix home'. Figuring out how it works with 'guix home container', I can already tell I will like it a lot!

Enabling Bluetooth in #GuixSystem is so far one of the lowest hanging fruits, with simple power management: each of these features is only one line in the config.scm file and a ‘guix system reconfigure’ away.
Nice to now have wireless options for sound on this computer (speaker, headphones).
File transfer over Bluetooth will be a bit more complex it seems, but hopefully it’s only a matter of finding an app that does it.

After going somewhat in circles yesterday, some faster progress today: #GuixSystem can now use the Intel wifi card on this computer. It only took one ‘guix system reconfigure’ this time, possibly because I made sure I didn’t run ‘guix pull’ beforehand (if I understand correctly how #Guix functions, not running pull means it keeps currently installed versions of packages already present in the current system that the next system needs). And it definitely used substitutes automatically: no way it would have completed this fast if it had needed to compile a kernel.

It will be nice to no longer have this cable running across the room between the router and computer, catching things in between.

Next steps: configure Bluetooth so I can use a wireless speaker, configure sshd so I can do system tweaks and maintenance remotely from the laptop.

Some more progress configuring my #GuixSystem: yesterday night I managed to add nonguix as a system-wide channel with substitutes. But it took three attempts at ‘guix system reconfigure’ before it completed. The first time I forgot that it wouldn’t use the substitutes unless explicitly told so, so I cancelled and restarted it. The second time for some reason it still needed to build webkitgtk and this is no fun on a small computer… so I cancelled it after a long time of 100% CPU usage with very slow progress, and was about to give up after this one. Tried it once more with ‘--dry-run’ out of curiosity, which showed that finally it was going to download everything pre-built, so I ran it again and it only built 3 derivations and eventually completed.
I don’t understand why ‘system reconfigure’ updated channels every time (which triggered many derivation builds), I thought only ‘pull’ should do that (I did run pull first, but not before the other two attempts). So I probably need to read some sections of the #Guix documentation again.

Little progress last weekend... A successful installation, only after messing around with the installer until I realized I should use the generated config.scm as-is (attempts at customization at this stage trip up the installer), run `guix pull` and `guix system reconfigure` immediately after the first boot, then reboot, so I start with a current system. Only then can I customize with any chance of success.
Did that, but forgot to setup FDE. So here we go again tonight!

Progress today: I managed to setup the NUC’s UEFI to boot from removable media by default. This makes it much easier: if the bootable media is in, it boots; no need to press a function key to enter the boot menu.

I also tested that the #GuixSystem installer I made boots correctly on the NUC.

Still baby steps for now, mostly because I can’t carve out enough uninterrupted free time for the bigger steps. In the meantime, I’m reading about #Guix. The more I read, the more I find it amazing.

Trying to find how to enter the NUC’s boot menu, I first found this help page: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005847/intel-nuc.html
Which led me to this one: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000089801/intel-nuc.html
The trick to bypass the NUC’s “fast boot”: start it with a long press (3 s) on the power button instead of a simple press. Doing so, I got to a menu and realized that the keyboard I use sends function keys only if I also press the Fn key. So maybe this also works during the regular boot, will check this next.

Soon ready to install #GuixSystem!

The iso produced by `guix system image`, on a USB stick, gives a functioning installer. My laptop could boot from it. But not the Intel NUC mini-computer: for some reason, hitting the suggested key during startup doesn’t enter the boot menu, so Ubuntu boots. Will need to figure this out before I can install #GuixSystem on the NUC.

In the meantime I’ll familiarize myself with #Guix installed on Ubuntu. The documentation sometimes seems to assume Guix System, so some things remain unclear to me.