Re: How to install guix without root permission

[rohit yadav]

​

On Fri, Jan 6, 2017 at 9:18 AM, Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> wrote:

rohit yadav <address@hidden> skribis:

> ​Thanks for the reply. ​The proot (https://proot-me.github.io/) project
> allows you to map $HOME/gnu/store to /gnu/store etc. However, where I am
> struggling is the guixbuild users and group creation, and running guix
> daemon.

Yes, though PRoot relies on syscall interception using ptrace(2), which
is inefficient (which may or may not be a problem, depending on the
application).

​ I am not greatly familiar with the lower level details of linux kernel yet. How lot of these useful utilities work is not clear to me. I will probably work on it sometime (any references?). For now, the performance is not an issue. However,  the main issue how to create guixbuild group and users?​

> I am using kernel 4+, which supports namespaces.

​How should I check it? Currently I believe that ubuntu 16.04 LTS (host os) supports cgroup for LXD (LXC containers).​

Yes, but some distributions compile it out or turn it off by default.
See
<http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/guix/scripts/environment.scm#n517>,
for a way to check whether user namespaces are enabled.

> This reminds if there is any effort to provide a lxc container for
> guixSD.

Not that I know of, but I don’t think it would help the non-root use
case.

​Yes, I agree, it would make it really easy for people wanting to try guixsd and infact use in production inside lxc container. Also, from testing point it will be really easy. beside container utility provided by guix. May be not the highest priority for the developers right now.

Ludo’.