Subject: bug#64006: Installation frustration weekend

From: "pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2023 12:53:57 +0200

Hi Denys!  Sorry to hear, but thank you for writing which bugs still
cause trouble with Guix System.

I can say this:

Denys Nykula <[email-masked]> writes:
> Installation with a desktop environment (EXWM) started to "die
> unexpectedly" every time when loading subtitutes, please see installer-
> dump-790b17b6.

Not being a maintainer, I have not looked at the dump, but as you
reported, apparently this will be fixed by making a new Guix release,
because the latest Guix has fixes for dealing with substitute server
errors.

> (Nice thing) Didn't find a netcat tool in the installer image to copy

You can use “guix install netcat” in the installer, probably, at least
it will work after running “herd start cow-store /mnt” as described for
manual installation in the manual.  Not a bug in my opinion.

> Nothing hints that to enter the encryption key when it asks it the
> second time during the boot, the user has to switch their keyboard
> layout.

Yes … this is a bug, but how to fix it; does Debian do better?

> Console fonts lose Cyrillic support after the first pull and upgrade.
> Question marks appear in place of my letters instead.

This sounds like a bug/regression; in the source code
<https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/services/base.scm>,
it looks like it should work, because it uses GNU Unifont, but it does
not display Cyrillic for me either.  However, you could add kmscon to
your operating system config’s services field to make console fonts work
for all languages, for example like this

(services
 (cons* (service kmscon-service-type)
        …
        %desktop-services))

> (Probably impossible to fix by design, but worth mentioning) Pulling
> and downloading substitutes wastes hours of time and traffic, without
> estimates and with the warning split into many small messages without a
> total sum. Also seems like it happens from scratch after the boot,
> despite the installer having already pulled so much from the Internet.

Yes, I think double downloads cannot be fixed, because the installer is
tested to provide a first working version (except download errors …),
but it will always be outdated.

But why there are duplicate substitute messages in the console, I do not
know.  Is it a bug?

> …
> Nothing hints that the combination for layout switching is now
> Shift+Alt, not Alt+Shift.

Both have the same effect for me.  Shift+Alt and Alt+Shift both work for
me.  Strange.  What happens when you change the combination in your
operating system config’s keyboard layout settings and reconfigure?

> Video (Intel HD Graphics 400) freezes after gdm shows the mouse, so I
> can't use the environment or switch to a console to get a debug log.

Did it work in Debian?  Did you use nonfree drivers before?

Regards,
Florian