Re: First installation - Questions

[Sohom Bhattacharjee]

On 07/10/2017 03:14 PM, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Hello Sohom,
>
> Sohom Bhattacharjee <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> I recently attempted to install GUIX SD on my laptop. After about 5
>> initial iterations I was finally able to get GUIX SD on my laptop so
>> that it just worked. I used the basic config for my first try and I kept
>> on modifying that config for the subsequent 'init's. Here is my current
>> config: https://gitlab.com/83bytes/guix/blob/master/myConfig.scm
>>
>>
>> 1. Is there any way to remove all desktop services and run it in a
>> do-it-yourself mode (much like with Arch Linux) i.e. login into terminal
>> and startx to start the Xorg ?
> I think we don’t have a way to get ‘startx’ yet (help welcome!), so for
> now, the most DIY-mode we have is shown in the “lightweight-desktop”
> example with ratpoison & co.:
>
>   
> https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Using-the-Configuration-System.html#System-Service
>> 2. From reading the docs I figure that we are supposed to write
>> config.scm for everything including web servers. This also means doing a
>> `guix system reconfigure` after every change (even the trivial ones like
>> setting up another virtual host etc). Is there any way I can *not* do
>> this and run certain services like Apache or cron without declaring them
>> in the config ?
> You can always run them “by hand”, but then you don’t get the advantages
> of using GuixSD.
>
> What makes you wary of running “guix system reconfigure”?
After my second installation of Guix SD i changed a lot stuff in the
config file and reconfigured but somehow that didn't work properly. So i
ended up having to do single edits to the config and then running
reconfigure after every edit.  That worked nicely.

Also I couldn't help but think that in GUIX we would need to have
multiple declarations on the config for multiple virtual-hosts in nginx
and other web servers. Right ?
This means we should run a guix system reconfigure even if we want to
add another virtual-host.

I'm not wary of "guix system reconfigure", it just feels "new".

I guess I will have to ease into it. :-)

>
>> 3. If i do not declare a service in the config and i go on using it
>> traditionally (assuming we can do that); then does it mean that this
>> undeclared service will get lost upon a `guix system reconfigure` ?
> If you run it with custom scripts and the likes, “guix system” will not
> know about it so it won’t get lost.
>
> However, things like user accounts manually added will get lost on the
> next reboot.
That helped a lot! :-)

>> 4. How do I modify elogind settings ? ( i want to disable power button
>> and lid button controls )
> elogind has a wealth of settings:
>
>   
> https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/html_node/Desktop-Services.html#index-elogind_002dservice
>
> You can modify them using ‘modify-services’, as in:
>
>   (operating-system
>     ;; …
>     (services (modify-services %desktop-services
>                 (elogind-service-type config =>
>                                       (elogind-configuration
>                                         (inherit config)
>                                         (handle-power-key 'suspend))))))

Wow! Thanks!
>> 5. When i do a `guix size <package>` the sizes are generally huge (1.3Gb
>> for icecat in my system). Why is it so ?
> Arun explained this, hope that clarifies a bit.
>
>> 6. Is there a list of which packages are available as rebuilt
>> "substitutes" ( is this correct ?? ) and which ones need to be built
>> locally ?
> To complement Arun’s answer, “guix build PKG --dry-run” shows you what
> would be built and what would be downloaded as pre-built binaries.
Thanks for this one!

> HTH!
>
> Ludo’.
p.s. apologies for the late reply!

Thank You,
Sohom.