GNU Guix

Here are my notes on Guix. This is an investigation to migrate from #nix to #guix for my dev environment, basically emacs and ripgrep. Though I don’t want to install the build daemon as I’m used to run nix in a namespace on Fedora.

Setup

Grab the qcow vm image from https://guix.gnu.org/en/download/

Start with:

$ qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 4096 -cpu host -vga virtio \
    -device virtio-blk,drive=myhd -drive if=none,file=guix-system-vm-image-1.4.0.x86_64-linux.qcow2,id=myhd \
    -virtfs local,path=drive,mount_tag=host0,security_model=none,id=host0

Mount the host drive with:

$ sudo mount -t 9p -o trans=virtio host0 /mnt -oversion=9p2000.L

Usage

Pin the channels by running guix describe -f channels:

(list (channel
       (name 'guix)
       (url "https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git")
       (branch "master")
       (commit "d4869b7e43d823bccc8f6d81dd9f5d2c13cb8f25")
       (introduction
        (make-channel-introduction
         "9edb3f66fd807b096b48283debdcddccfea34bad"
         (openpgp-fingerprint
          "BBB0 2DDF 2CEA F6A8 0D1D  E643 A2A0 6DF2 A33A 54FA")))))

Then run the command with:

$ guix time-machine -C /mnt/channels.scm -- system reconfigure /mnt/config.scm

System Config

Here is a VM config:

;; Checkout https://github.com/SystemCrafters/guix-live-image/blob/master/config.scm