Hacker News Reader

Comment by peterburkimsher | Hacker News Reader

I tried installing GUIX on my 2013 MacBook Air 11" on Sunday night.

The installer insists on erasing the entire disk, not sharing with other partitions.

I removed the SSD for safety, and plugged in a second USB stick.

The installer took from 21:20 to 7:30 am the next day. It needed to be connected to wired Thunderbolt Ethernet, which in my case means in the laundry.

Downloading packages took a long time (about 2 hours). "grafting" took longer. Finally it failed to set up the bootloader. No big deal, try GRUB or rEFIt, right? But they didn't detect it.

There is an "EFI Boot" option in the startup menu (holding option). That just boots to a black screen.

I'm sorry, but issues like this mean that I think GUIX is not desktop-ready for bare metal. It'll be relegated to a virtual machine (along with OpenIndiana, PureOS, Haiku, Hello, etc).

View on HN

You are aware that you are trying GUIX out on hardware which has been tightly locked away from being interoperable with anything besides MacOS, right?

Are you aware that Apple hardware pre-2015 was much more open than it is today? I agree with your sentiment for modern Macs, and that's why I'm trying to find a suitable OS for switching.

When there's a limited scope of what drivers are required, it should be easier, not harder, to support certain hardware. Being unable to read NVME drives (which have been around since 2011) is no longer acceptable for an OS in 2020.

AFAIK Guix stays very true to the GNU values of ONLY shipping free software, including drivers. A couple years back I had a similar issue where I couldn't get my WiFi card to work because I'd have to recompile the kernel while including nonfree libraries... which is pretty hard to do if you know nothing about Guix!

Maybe I'll try it again in a while. Not sure if it's available for raspberry pi, but it would be great to try it there and eventually switch to it on my laptop (once JJ change WiFi card!)

I used to have a 2011 macbook pro. I couldn't boot USB media at all. It's not a new problem. After my optical drive died, I had to resort to creating my own installation media on a hard disk partition..

Guix rejects non-free software in their repos, so I would be unsurprised to hear that no contributors use Apple hardware.

I agree that what you are trying to accomplish should be doable and even non-trivial. This is definitely a disadvantage of having a more automated installation procedure.

You can do manual partitioning in the installer.

The 1.1.0 release had a problem with certain EFI configurations, but I think they are fixed with 1.2.0. If not, please file a bug report!

What made you pick guix over nixos?

I tried both.

Choosing NIX - Installer from GRUB just boots live, not actually an installation process.

I tried copying the USB stick to a partition using cp -Lr. Still not booting. I tried manually specifying that partition using GRUB. The errors were:

Timed out waiting for device /dev/root, trying to mount anyway.

mounting /dev/root on /iso...

mount: mounting /dev/root on /mnt-root/iso failed: No such file or directory

At that point I gave up.

You're supposed to use the installer image to partition the disk, create a configuration, then run nixos-install; instructions are at https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/index.html#sec-install.... It's not too bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com