GNU Guix

December 21, 2020

Today I spent the better part of the day installing GNU Guix System onto one of my laptops. There are a couple of ways to run Guix: you can install just the package manager on a foreign Linux distribution, or you can install the Guix System, which is its own Linux (or GNU/Hurd) distribution. I originally investigated putting Guix System on my Raspberry Pi, but after searching for some instructions, I found that I would probably have been in for a day of pain. The Guix System distribution only includes free software and Linux kernels without binary blobs, so it was a safer bet to go with some common x64 hardware. I have been running the package manager on my machine for a couple of weeks and was toying with the idea of having a bare bones Linux distro with just the package manager on top, but it seems that you miss out on all the system-level features when going that route.

Why Guix? Here are a couple of reasons:

On the downside, it may take a little longer than something like Ubuntu due to it being targeted towards more technical users and the lack of information on the internet on how to solve problems. If you are using hardware that’s not supported, you might need to go through some extra steps to get a custom kernel. Given you probably want to do it the Guix way rather than git clone https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git && ... && make install, it will take a little longer to get set up, but once you have, you’ll be in a better place for upgrading. I think the value proposition is about spending a little more time to set up your system so that upgrades and bootstrapping a new system can be easier.

On a traditional Linux distribution, the user is going to edit a bunch of config files all over the place, and if you were to reinstall, you’d take quite a bit of time getting things back to where they were. Having your dot files in a git repo makes it a lot quicker, but there is still a lot of stuff stored outside of the dot files.

Let’s take a look at some code. This is what my system configuration file looks like shortly after the install. It was mostly generated by the graphical installer which made the install a breeze:

(use-modules (gnu))
(use-service-modules desktop networking ssh xorg)

(operating-system
 (locale "en_US.utf8")
 (timezone "America/Los_Angeles")
 (keyboard-layout (keyboard-layout "us"))
 (host-name "timmy-t430s")
 (users (cons* (user-account
                 (name "timmy")
                 (comment "Timmy")
                 (group "users")
   	  (shell "/home/timmy/.guix-profile/bin/zsh")
                 (home-directory "/home/timmy")
                 (supplementary-groups
   			    ;; added "input" for sway
                   '("wheel" "netdev" "audio" "video" "input")))
               %base-user-accounts))
 (packages
   (append
    (map specification->package
     '("nss-certs"
       "alacritty"
       "emacs-next-pgtk"
       "git"
       "notmuch"
       "icecat"
       "zsh"
       "i3status"
       "sway"
       "curl"))
     %base-packages))
 (services
   (append
     (list (service openssh-service-type)
           (service network-manager-service-type)
           (service wpa-supplicant-service-type))
     %base-services))
 (bootloader
   (bootloader-configuration
     (bootloader grub-efi-bootloader)
     (target "/boot/efi")
     (keyboard-layout keyboard-layout)))
 (swap-devices
   (list (uuid "3a8b19bd-f826-4d3f-8c48-521d748108a6")))
 (file-systems
   (cons* (file-system
            (mount-point "/boot/efi")
            (device (uuid "0FEC-651D" 'fat32))
            (type "vfat"))
          (file-system
            (mount-point "/")
            (device
              (uuid "3565f88e-5cb9-4369-ba31-f69b74fb9bff"
                    'ext4))
            (type "ext4"))
          %base-file-systems)))

I don’t know if it ever detected wireless so I ended up building my first ethernet cable as a part of the project.

I run the sway wayland compositor with mostly just Emacs, alacritty, and a web browser. Sway had some issues starting:

so I ran it with:

WLR_DRM_DEVICES=/dev/dri/card0 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=~/.tmp sway -d 2> ~/.tmp/sway.log

and it seemed to start fine after that (and I added my user to the input group).

One other change is that Guix uses GNU Shepherd instead of systemd. I like systemd, but I guess I have to appreciate that Shepherd can be programmed using scheme configuration files instead of another custom ini/toml format. Although I sort of wonder what kind of isolation there is between the code you write in the configuration and what the init process is running.

I created /home/timmy/.config/shepherd with the contents:

(use-modules (shepherd service)
	     (ice-9 match))

(define-syntax-rule (with-fork body ...)
  (match (primitive-fork)
    (0 (begin body ...))
    (pid pid)))

(define (run-command command)
  (zero? (status:exit-val (apply system* command))))

(register-services

 (make <service>
        #:provides '(notmuch)
        #:requires '()
        #:start
	(lambda args
          (with-fork
           (while #t
            (system* "/home/timmy/.config/notmuch/new.sh")
            (sleep 100))))
        #:stop (make-kill-destructor))


  (make <service>
    #:provides '(emacsd)
    #:requires '()
    #:start (lambda _ (run-command '("emacs" "--daemon")))
    #:environment-variables
    (list
     "HOME=/home/timmy"
     "SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/run/user/1000/keyring/ssh")
    #:stop (lambda _ (not (run-command '("emacsclient" "--eval" "(kill-emacs)")))))


  )

(action 'shepherd 'daemonize)

Then you can run shepherd as a user. Then run herd start on your services.

I’ll need to spend some more time with Guix before I have a fully formed opinion about it, but I like both Scheme and using desired state configuration, so the chances are good I’ll grow to like it. I think one good application would be home router config, so I’ll need to look into what it’d take to use it on the Raspberry Pi.