Subject: bug#37021: GuixSD 1.01-i686 install DVD boot failure on Macbook1, 1: failed to resolve partition

From: Danny Milosavljevic <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2019 00:32:49 +0200

Hi Mark,
Hi Calvin,

On Thu, 22 Aug 2019 17:26:50 -0400
Mark H Weaver <[email-masked]> wrote:

> I appreciate your effort to make life easier for Calvin, but in general
> it seems like a bad security practice to post large unsigned disk images
> and asking users to try them.

In general I agree.  So I would suggest Calvin to try it and then later delete
the target drive.

I think it is unreasonable to expect users to build disk images of distributions
that don't work for them (it's nice if they do--but I don't like the shirking of
responsibility.  It's a large time investment that has a big initial learning
curve and no guaranteed payoff).

> A digital signature from you would
> improve matters somewhat, but ideally there should also be a description
> of how to reproduce this image.

In this case, the current Guix release image doesn't have one important fix
that directly affects Macbooks.  Therefore, I built a current image of guix
master (without any extra changes--so it does contain the fix):

$ ./pre-inst-env guix system disk-image -t iso9660 -s i686-linux gnu/system/install.scm

As I said in the past, let's please release Guix again soon so the fix is going
to users.

Also, I'm curious whether it improves the situation for Calvin (reading through
the thread, it might not--the failure is too late).

> It's also not good to be promoting Google Drive here, which requires
> non-free Javascript.  I'm aware that IceCat includes an extension to
> allow Google Drive to at least partially work with LibreJS, but I was
> unable to easily get it to work on my IceCat configuration where I use
> NoScript instead.

In the end there's a limit to how much time I'm going to spend on this.
Google drive works and is easy enough to use--if there's an alternative that
at least takes less effort than Calvin building the image on his own, I'll
use that.