Hi Eduardo,
Eduardo Mercovich <[email protected]> writes:
Dear fellow guixers.
1. The manual partition installer that I had to use -because
there was
another working partition to be cared of in the disk- gave me no
indication about a swap partition. I know it is manual and so it
may
assume complete knowledge, but now I don't know if the OS has no
swap
and it needs it, or if it uses the existing one. That is, there
is a
kind of medium level of knowledge that allows manual
installation but
could benefit with a good practices overview and a suggestion
(even if
it may be needed to be applied manually in a manual install).
I agree with you. It seems like Guix has two options for
partitioning, completely manual setup (outside the installer,
using fdisk, parted, or similar tools), or completely automatic
(in the text-graphical installer). A "semi-automatic" mode in the
installer would be very helpful.
The graphical installer doesn’t support configuring swap with
encryption. To do this effectively, it would need LVM support.
The approach taken by other distros (ex. Debian) is to create a
LUKS partition holding a LVM volume group, and put root and swap
logical volumes inside it. This setup allows a single passphrase
to unlock all volumes.
2. During that installation, there is a question about the
cypher tag
(in Spanish "etiqueta de cifrado"). There is no explanation
about what
this is, and being part of an encrypted partition, could cause
some
confusion (at least it caused /me/ some confusion ;P). Maybe we
could
add a small text indicating that this is only a name for the
partition, and what does this name mean in the system, so it is
not
confused with any passphrase or password?
This is odd, I don’t think I get asked this when I use the
installer with US English.
4. When the installation ended and after rebooting I've found
with
real anguish that the other bootable partition was not present
in the
grub menu. Being used to the Debian installer including them,
just
didn't imagined that it could be any different. Of course this
is
perfectly possible, it is just that -as with anyone- my previous
experience configured the expectation about what was supposed to
happen. While it is not at all a hard requirement and it is easy
for
me to propose it since being no programmer I have no idea if it
takes
2, 20 or 200 hours of work, I'd like to ask if we could evaluate
the
possibility to search for -and include- other bootable operating
systems in the grub options. There are 2 main reasons for this
request: the 1st one is expressing care and consideration for
people's
options (being a values related reason make it personal and so,
it may
or not be valid for everyone). However the 2nd one is much more
concrete: *being able to keep their current working OSs andd
partitions lowers a lot the barrier to try guix*. And more guix
users
are good for everyone in this community and the guix mission in
general. :)
I agree with this.
5. Contrasting with the previous, this last point is really a
very
small one. The desktop environments chosen to be installed were
Mate
(just a simple one to start if in trouble), i3 (the one I use)
and
exwm (with the hope to try it). Mate didn't include by default
any web
browser. I'd like to argue that since it is such a common and
fundamental tool for most people these days (we can debate if
this is
good and/or desirable), if it is within our reach by default we
should
provide one. Anyone would do, no matter how simple.
The ask is reasonable, but this is difficult to do and dangerous;
on balance, I think we shouldn’t.
Since Guix is a rolling release distribution, and web browsers are
full of vulnerabilities, installing a web browser during
installation means installing a vulnerable one. It also means a
new version will be downloaded on the first update.
There’s also a boring technical issue, which is that web browsers
belong in user profiles, not installed at the system level, and
the installer has no facility for configuring a user profile.
I simply expose here what happened from a hybrid, UX<>tech point
of
view with the hope to make the new guix user experience better
for
others. :)
Thank you very much for taking the time to write up your
experience!
-- Ian
