Just installed GuixSD on the Minifree x200. It's running really nicely. I'm surprised at this point that most of the things I want are here.

Installing GuixSD mostly means booting up a live usb key, partitioning your drive, copying and modifying a scheme file that describes your system, and then splatting it to disk. That worked pretty well, I made few adjustments. Once it ran I was surprised at how easy it was. I've now joined Aeva and Tsyesika in GuixSD land. For me, it'll be on my primary machine.

Most of it was fairly smooth (I mean, assuming you're comfortable with this kind of command line install) though I hit some bumps; how to get an encrypted setup was not clearly documented. What I really want is an encrypted LVM so even swap is encrypted, but LVM is not suported yet in Guix. I next tried an encrypted root including home, but this turned out to be difficult because Guix does not copy its initrd and bzImage stuff to /boot, it loads it from /gnu/store/, so this means that you have to decrypt the root partition from Grub itself, which is annoying and not supported by the out-of-the-box Grub config writer.

However, doing an encrypted /home/ with an unencrypted root is relatively easy. You can just describe the "mapped device" in a Guix system config which makes that all easy. I'll post my config as an example.

So now I have an encrypted /home/ but an unencrypted root partition, but it's okay, because I left a 30GB slot open on the hard drive for a Debian root as well.

My goal is to use Debian as a fallback while I get the rest of the pieces I need in place. Hopefully by the time encrypted lvm support comes to Guix, I won't need it, and I can reformat then.

Really enjoying this experience so far!