guix on aramo (but avoid it if you can)

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Avron

I am a translator!

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Joined: 08/18/2020

I recommend not to use guix on trisquel because:

  1. updates are a pain
  2. it is more difficult to get support for using guix on trisquel than for using trisquel packages
  3. when you realise the two above issues, if you have a lot of data that require a later version of a package than the one in trisquel, you can't use the trisquel package anymore so you are trapped with guix

So my general advice:

  • if you are not already using guix on trisquel, don't use it
  • if you are missing a feature in a trisquel package, try to find a replacement with another trisquel package
  • if you still decide using guix, install as few guix packages as possible

I have been using aramo on my desktop for several months, without guix, but recently I made a big mistake: I travelled with my laptop with nabia and guix and used darktable for countless hours on it, and when I try to import my data to darktable on the desktop, it does not work well because I am trying to use with darktable 3.8 things that were generated with darktable 4.0. So I decided to install guix on aramo and I really plan not to install anything else than darktable.

Then I looked at the guix manual and it is now suggesting to use the package in debian/ubuntu-based distros and indeed, aramo has a guix package. So I went:

$ sudo apt install guix

I followed the suggestions from the manual (I have nscd already installed):

$ guix install glibc-locales
$ export GUIX_LOCPATH=$HOME/.guix-profile/lib/locale
$ guix install fontconfig
$ fc-cache -rv

Then I ran the updates (takes a very long time):

$ sudo -i guix pull
$ sudo systemctl restart guix-daemon.service
$ guix pull
$ guix package update

Then I rebooted and the login failed, so I went to a terminal:

$ cat <<EOF >>~/.profile 
export XDG_DATA_DIRS="/usr/local/share:/usr/share/${XDG_DATA_DIRS:+:}$XDG_DATA_DIRS"
EOF

I tried the login again and it worked. I installed darktable and it seems to handle my photos fine, but I feel like I felt in a trap which I previously tried to avoid.

andyprough
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Joined: 02/12/2015

Where did you find this?
>"export XDG_DATA_DIRS="/usr/local/share:/usr/share/${XDG_DATA_DIRS:+:}$XDG_DATA_DIRS""

That looks a bit exotic. Or are you just an XDG magician?

Avron

I am a translator!

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Joined: 08/18/2020

It was kindly provided by Adonay Felipe Noguera (adfeno) on the guix help mailing list when I raised that problem more than a year ago. He mentioned that it would be worth looking more at /etc/profile.d/guix.sh but the fix was working. I had the same issue every time I installed guix on Trisquel and this always fixed it.

Based on a few issues raised on this forum, this variable apparently is often the problem when one fails to login to an Xwindow session.

From what I saw in the bash manual, this is setting XDG_DATA_DIRS to /usr/local/share:/usr/share/ if it is undefined, otherwise it is prepending /usr/local/share:/usr/share/: to it.