Hello,
first of all, thanks to everyone involved for making this project
possible. It is a very promising alternative or rather a next step to
package / systems management. I am Guix new newbie trying to go the full
route of setting up a new desktop system on a laptop. My final target to
have a system running as well as my previous (ArchLinux) one.
As seemingly all GuixSD beginners, I am feeling a bit lost. There is
quite some documentation, but much of it works rather as a reference
than as a guide. Also, many questions seem to have been answered on the
mailing list already, but they are very cumbersome to find and skip
through.
I think the project could do better lowering the barrier of entry to
newbies, first of all through offering a FAQ. That would be really
useful in my opinion.
Here are some questions I am currently struggling with, hoping for some
help.
1) In addition to my operating system declaration set up using "guix
system reconfigure", I have begun making a package manifest file
(applied using "guix package -m") with specific packages for my user
account, e.g. desktop applications. This seems to be a clean way of
separating system and user packages.
When I started installing packages via the manifest (instead of
manually), I noticed packages not in the manifest were being removed.
Should've known what, my fault. I since then re-added packages that had
been uninstalled.
But additionally I noticed things are not working anymore: Icons and
window decorations in GTK applications are now missing, dmenu does not
show any application entries. I don't know what is happening here? I
tried switching to an older generation in my user profile, but the
problem remains. So maybe something different changed. I am unsure why
this XDG stuff does not work any more. Any hints?
2) I need to adjust the main Xorg configuration file in order to not
load the synaptics driver. (From my experience, this is the only way to
make libinput manage the touchpad, so I can get tap-to-click and
multi-touch gestures working. This should probably be configurable in
the future.) As gnu/services/xorg.scm does not allow adjusting these
options, it means I have to change the original code.
So the question is, how can I replace a single service definition with
my own one? Does this mean replacing the system guix instance with my
own, modified checkout somehow?
3) I need to develop a few new packages for my needs. Is there a way to
add additional package sources so I can conveniently use my own packages
alongside the ones provides in the official Guix repo?
Thanks for listening ;)
Best
Martin