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2014-12-23.log

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<hoplaahei>is there any support for using UEFI with guix?
<tadni_> hoplaahei: Not to my knowledge.
<tadni_>We'd probably need some special mechanism other distro's like Fedora has, but too, such a thing, to my (very limited and probably wrong) understanding of such system is dependent to Linux iirc.
<tadni_>So it'd be hard to make such a thing portable, I would think, we were to support other kernels.
<tadni_>Could be completly offbase, if someone wants to correct me.
<jxself>I think you're thinking of Secure Boot, which people are supposed to be able to disable... at least on x86 machine.
<jxself>And, UEFI machines should also have a BIOS compatibility mode too.
<jxself>So Guix should run just fine on them, even if it requires going into the UEFI menu to turn off Secure Boot and turn on the BIOS compatibility mode.
<tadni_> jxself: My uefi bios has a compatibility layer, but it's pretty bad. Really, my uefi implementation is pretty bad in-general. I can't load the Guix generated distro in any capacity on that box via USB, because loading from a USB device is broken there.
<tadni_>Also, the problem is, that UEFI's secureboot is many times not unlocked on non-UEFI systems.
<tadni_>Which will likely become more and more of an issue, as Guix-generated Distro ages.
<hoplaahei>tadni: I know you can work around booting USBs on some BIOSes by setting the first partition on the USB as active
<tadni_>hoplaahei: No idea how one would go about doing such a thing. That being said it's not a huge deal now, I won't switch to guix full-time on my mainbox -- until I or someone else packages Stumpwm. :^P
<hoplaahei>tadni_: it would appear from the guix manual that you could import stumpwm from nixos into guix: http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/guix.html#Invoking-guix-import
<hoplaahei>guix import nix ~/path/to/nixpkgs stumpwm
<hoplaahei>I think that would be the format
<hoplaahei>well it looks like it would at least give you the skeleton. if not all the correct dependencies
<tadni_>Oh! Did that actually get added?
<hoplaahei>not sure? I just saw in the manual, so I would assume so
<tadni_>That is very, very cool, if we actually have nixpkgs implemented in some manner.
*tadni_ guix pulls and trys!
<hoplaahei>looks like it can do it for other sources like python packages too
<hoplaahei>hope they add perl
*tadni_ is actually really excited now... hope this works.
<hoplaahei>tadni_: as for setting first partition active, you would just find out what is the usb device e.g., /dev/sdb and do something like 'cfdisk /dev/sdb' and just select the first partition and toggle it bootable in the options of cfdisk, then write the changes
<hoplaahei>tadni_: guess the only problem you might have is if stumpwm recipe (whatever nix calls them) refers to other dependencies that are named differently/not available in guix
<hoplaahei>but it would at least take out some of the effort of writing your own
<tadni_>I get a "Throw to key `parse-error' with args `(#<input: #{read pipe}# 12> "XML [22], unexpexted EOF")'." from "guix import nix ~/nixpkgs stumpwm"
<hoplaahei>maybe you need to check out the nixpkgs git repo manually into ~/nixpkgs
<hoplaahei>git clone https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.git
<hoplaahei>try that
<hoplaahei>in home dir
<tadni_>hoplaahei: That's how I originally got it.
<hoplaahei>I wonder if its because they only provide it as binary package and not from source
*tadni_ is currently formating his thumb-drive and downloading the latest distro release -- to test at the usb advice. :^)
<tadni_>I tried, as a joke, kde, and it gave the same error.
<tadni_>Yeah, ratpoison, same issue.
<tadni_>hoplaahei: Can you link me to the manual page?
<tadni_>Not to say what you said wasn't right, but maybe I have to set something.
<tadni_>I'm guessing it might just be an issue with this version of nixpkgs though.
<hoplaahei> http://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/guix.html#Invoking-guix-import
<hoplaahei>apparently it only imports the nix code and not the bash code, but it would probably still work for some nixpkgs and still help to give the basic outline of what it should look like
<tadni_>The example given, suggests Libreoffice... which still doesn't work so... I'm guissing it's on my end.
<tadni_>That's fine, that's not a big concern to me for now. Knowing if such a distro would work on my main box is though. :^)
<hoplaahei>in one of the irc logs for this channel I see it says you need to have nix installed
<tadni_>Well, um, as suspected -- this drive is already bootable.
<hoplaahei>are you booting on a thinkpad laptop?
<tadni_>Nope, a uefi'd Samsung.
<tadni_>Also, installed nix. Same EOF error.
<hoplaahei>your BIOS might be the same as mine where it has a bug booting GPT partitioned USBs
<hoplaahei>I followed this guide to do a hack on the usb pen:
<hoplaahei> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-i386/2013-March/010437.html
<hoplaahei>guide uses a copy of bsd fdisk though so you'd need to boot from bsd live disk to try out the hack
<hoplaahei>tricks bios by making a fake dummy partition one
<tadni_>I mean, it's not a huge-huge deal right now either. zdavis is working on *.iso support at some capacity -- so I'm hoping on that by 1.0.
<tadni_>And probably on my end, get a CL-Build-System and Stumpwm poop'd out by 1.0 of Guix.
<hoplaahei>I'm going to install guix myself try and get this nix import working
<hoplaahei>first time I've tried guix
<tadni_>It's not even a huge deal in the longrun, as I hope to have a Gluglug'd based libreboot running, x60 this time next year.
<hoplaahei>stumpwm has always been a pain to build. remember building it back in the day
<tadni_>hoplaahei: If you are doing so on my accord, feel no pressure to do so.
<hoplaahei>well the reason I stopped using it at the time was it crashed to much. other than that its pretty nice
<hoplaahei>I use sawfish now anyway and happy with that
<tadni_>Using what, Stumpwm?
<hoplaahei>yea. it might be more stable now
<tadni_>I've not had issuses in the 2 years I've used it, which were not directly related to me.
<hoplaahei>was looking at guile-wm today. looks interesting: https://github.com/mwitmer/guile-wm
<tadni_>Yeah, mwitmer seems to not have the or interest to continue it more seriously though.
<tadni_>I'm hoping someone does this mostly for me, but in a 1 1/2 - 2 years, if no-one does it by then -- I'll probably have a go at a Wayland Compositor and simplisitc toolkit for graphics, for Guile.
<hoplaahei>you have spoken to him? does he visit these channels?
<hoplaahei>I'm interested in having a go at something like that myself, though it might be a bit beyond my programming capabilities
<tadni_>hoplaahei: I've exchanged a few words with him, I think davexunit knows a bit more than me about this -- he's submitted actual packages and assumingly talked to him a bit more in-route to getting them pushed upstream, but initally it seems to of been a work/time related issue.
<tadni_>Now, not sure.
<tadni_>My close-to-ideal distro set up right now, would be guix+dmd -> wayland-compositor-in-guile + graphic-toolkit-in-guile -> GuilEmacs + Lispkit-in-Guile.
<tadni_>Wayland now can render right to wayland, so that's a good step in that direction.
<tadni_>In any case, I'm very much excited for the future of Guile and too the general GNU Operating System do to the gumption that many Guile Hackers have shown since 2.x.
<hoplaahei>same
<tadni_>Okay, probably should head to bed in a sec. It's 3 am here.
<hoplaahei>ok goodnight
<tadni_>Peace peeps. o/
*tadni_ is afk.
<hoplaahei>my intel wireless has non-free binary blob, but I don't have any spare dongles. Is it possible to copy over the firmware manually and get it working on the install usb image? I just want it up for the time being before I order dongle
<rekado_>Is there a way to install two packages of differing versions? I would like to use both python3 and python2, but using guix package -i python-2.7.6 removes python-3.3 from my profile.
<rekado_>That's a bit of a problem for scientific software tools for Python, because a lot of these tools depend on particular Python versions.
<rekado_>As the python binaries include the version numbers in their names, would it not be possible to keep both Python versions around in the profile?
<hoplaahei>or more specifically, can I force linux-libre not to reject non-free blobs in the /lib/firmware directory?
<gry>i would use it in a vm until i get the dongle
<hoplaahei>so it seems linuxlibre does not support non-free blobs at all. how can I replace with custom kernel?
<tadni_>hoplaahei: Linux-libre's point is that it has no binary-blobs. I'm not sure how Linux-libre builds, but there might be an easy way to make a custom package inherit linux-libre and do some minor config options.
<jxself>tadni_: It's not a config thing. request_firmware is logged, and when your log has entries complaining that some proprietary program wasn't found it's seen as recommending non-free software. Because of the way the firmware loading works (the kernel has no way to know what's actually available and so has to make the request to find out at which point it's too late because the request has been logged), the only way to avoid that is getting rid of it
<jxself>It's an unfortunate bug.
<tadni_>jxself: I meant a build-config option, for a package.
<jxself>ah, OK
<jxself>I was thinking kernel config...
<tadni_>jxself: Yeah, sorry, I haven't slept again yet -- probably not being as clear as possible.
<rekado_>packaging Java is hard.
<davexunit>rekado_: I bet. good luck!
<hoplaahei>jxself: ah right so it isn't deliberate then. well I can't be bothered flashing my lenovo bios to remove whitelist so I can install new pci-e card, so guess I'll get a dongle and risk it bending if I'm too rough with the laptop
<hoplaahei>found one that works anyway in the store near where I live
<rekado_>The GCC Java compiler (GCJ) uses the Eclipse Java Complier (ECJ) to parse .java sources.
<rekado_>I cannot compile ECJ with GCJ, obviously.
<rekado_>At the time GCJ is built I would need to have a (compiled) copy of ecj.jar in the source directory (or elsewhere on disk)
<rekado_>(And I only need GCJ to compile Ant and eventually OpenJDK)
<rekado_>Is adding a bootstrap binary of ecj.jar to build GCJ okay?
<rekado_>for now I'll add an ecj-bootstrap package which contains the binary, then make gcj take that as an input.
<alezost`>rekado_: ISTR you can install both pythons in a single profile with "guix package -i python python-2.7.6"
<rekado_>alezost`: thanks, this worked.