Hello Guix! Following advice and encouragements from Vagrant and Danny :-), I successfully installed GuixSD on the SoftIron OverDrive 1000 machine that was donated last January¹ (its PSU died a while back and I just received a replacement from SoftIron, and I thought it was also a good time to replace the distro.)
The device comes with openSuSE preinstalled and I had first installed Guix from the binary tarball. It’s a “normal” UEFI machine so we can use ‘grub-efi’ directly. I came up with this GuixSD config: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix/maintenance.git/tree/hydra/overdrive.scm The main difficulty was to come up with the right combination of modules for the initrd, without which we’d fail to mount the root file system. Fortunately the OverDrive has a serial output that makes it easy to debug boot failures. With that config, I just run: guix system init overdrive.scm / and that’s it! On the first boot, the GuixSD activation snippets fail while trying to install /etc, /etc/pam.d, and /etc/skel, and /etc/ssl because these directories already exist (from openSuSE) whereas GuixSD assumes that they don’t. The solution is just to remove/rename them from the Guile initrd REPL. Once this is done, booting proceeds flawlessly and happiness ensues. Really nice to see that it’s this easy and fully functional with 100% free software! Cheers, Ludo’. ¹ https://gnu.org/software/guix/blog/2018/aarch64-build-machines-donated/