Re: Merging ‘wip-newt-installer’ in master?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Mathieu,

Mathieu Othacehe <address@hidden> skribis:

> I pushed a few commits to the branch. All main features are now
> implemented. The only important stuff missing (in my opinion) is the
> encryption support during partitioning (as well as RAID and LVM I
> guess). I also took most of Thorsten remarks into account.
>
> I'll keep tinkering the branch in the next few days, but it is now
> possible to have a complete experience and install a real system!

Sorry for the long delay!

I gave it a try with ‘guix system vm gnu/system/install.scm’ and overall
it looks really nice to me!  A few random things:

  • On the first screen, should “Graphical install” come first?

  • Should the choice of a locale come before the welcome screen?

  • Should the keyboard layout default to “English (US)” rather than
    “Afghani”?  Likewise for the layout variant.

  • s/Ok/OK/  :-)

  • For the partition encryption passphrase, we should probably ask for
    confirmation, no?

  • There’s a debug dialog box called “user-partitions” that pops up
    after hitting “Ok” on the partition choice.  :-)

  • In the “Desktop environments” screen, we should we allow for no
    desktop environments, and then (or before?) have a second screen
    where users can choose between a headless server kind of install or
    a lightweight-X11-desktop kind of install?

  • At the end, after seeing the complete OS definition, I got “execlp:
    cryptsetup: Operation not permitted” written at the top of the
    “Congratulations” screen, and it looks like nothing was actually
    installed (I had chosen the encrypted-root setup).  After that I
    got:

      ERROR: pty: failed to exec child /gnu/store/…-installer: Operation not 
permitted (exec_child() in src/pty.c:299)

    in a loop and the VM became unusable.  Not sure what happened!

So what are the next steps?  IMO we should consider merging real soon
and get people to test.  WDYT?

Thanks!

Ludo’.