Howdy! Did you see there’s a new ‘guix system’ command? It’s wonderful. Drop the following in a file, say ‘os-config.scm’:
--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- (use-modules (gnu packages emacs) (gnu packages xorg) (gnu packages base) (gnu packages admin) (gnu packages guile) (gnu packages bash) (gnu packages linux) (gnu packages less) (gnu packages gdb) (gnu services base) (gnu services networking) (gnu services xorg)) (operating-system (host-name "guix-is-great") (timezone "Europe/Paris") (locale "en_US.UTF-8") (users (list (user-account (name "joe") (uid 1000) (gid 100) (comment "Joe") (home-directory "/home/joe")))) (services (cons* (slim-service) ;; QEMU networking settings. (static-networking-service "eth0" "10.0.2.10" #:name-servers '("10.0.2.3") #:gateway "10.0.2.2") %base-services)) (packages (list coreutils bash xterm emacs guile-2.0 dmd util-linux strace gdb xlsclients net-tools inetutils findutils grep sed procps psmisc less))) --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- Then run: ./pre-inst-env guix system vm os-config.scm and finally run the script it returns. The thing boots to Xorg and SLiM. From there you can log in as ‘root’ (there’s a bug preventing from logging in as ‘joe’, but that’ll be fixed when I get unionfs in place), and get into Ratpoison (if you’re not familiar with it, type ‘C-t ?’.) xterm doesn’t work currently because of missing device files, but until then, you can run Emacs (via ‘C-t !’), and M-x shell if you really want a shell. The VM shares its store with the host, so the VM image itself is small and quickly built. This means that it’s now quite easy to add new service definitions (info "(guix) Defining Services") and test them. Of course we can then add other ‘guix system’ actions, in particular ‘boot’ and ‘install’. That is not too difficult per se, but it’ll make more sense when we really have all the important system services in a sufficiently polished state (running e2fsck, supporting encrypted partitions, running udev, having Xorg run on real hardware, etc.) Feedback welcome! Ludo’. PS: This is +/- what you could be seen on the FOSDEM video, but it’s even better to try it at home. :-)