Fwd: Re: VM image: can we simplify its use?

[Daniel Jiang]

Oops, forgot to add mailing list to reply.

Begin forwarded message:

From: Daniel Jiang <address@hidden>
Date: April 4, 2019 at 18:08:43 CDT
To: Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: VM image: can we simplify its use?

Hello,

If this can refer to the qemu vm image available for download on the guix website. I've got some thoughts to chime in.

I think some scripts/info for walking through the setup could help a bunch if bundled in the image like how other distros do (thinking of Slackware or Ubuntu as an example). 

A script like the one for installing/setup of Guix could solve some of this well and can be as simple as downloading the image and prompting for resize.

I'll quickly add that instructions to login with 'root' would help too. As a beginner who tried the vm image I felt lost at the login prompt.

I like the idea of a larger qcow2 image as well since it's distributed compressed on: https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/download/

 

Maybe different 'versions' can be made available or as options during a hypothetical setup that each include different packages/configuration s? Minimal, Desktop, Server, etc. (Thinking of Ubuntu and Slackware again)

Sincerely,

Daniel Jiang

On Apr 4, 2019, at 09:56, Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> wrote:

Hello Guix!

I had criticism about the VM image:

 https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/system/examples/vm-image.tmpl

Namely that you have to manually set up networking, and then to manually
resize the image just to be able to run ‘guix pull’, is considered
inconvenient (rightly so).

Would it be an option to install connman or something in the image?

What about making the image bigger?  I would expect the QCOW2 file to be
small, if the disk is full of zero.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.