Re: Installing guile-g-golf on Foreign Distro messes up GDM

[Andres Moreno]

Andy,

I really appreciate your thoughtful comment--your explanation makes sense and I bet is correct. Yet another reason to pursue using Guix as a system. As an alternative, a friend recommended using the `shell` command to set up the environment and run my programs--that would work well too.

My experience was disconcerting, particularly because I have been using Gnu Guix in a foreign distro as a package manager following the manual:

• I installed it using the standard binary installation script
• I have followed all the tips in the manual about including the various commands in .bash_profile and exporting variables as instructed, particularly in the Debian 12 case since I had just installed Guix and had not had an opportunity to do anything to mess up Guix yet

Maybe this is a documentation issue for Guix? Is there a section in the manual that discusses the solution you proposed? Is it my lack of understanding of how Guix works and best practices? What do you recommend as a next step to help spare users since this is a rather nasty landmine that could potentially also happen with other packages?

Cheers! afm

PS I am working my way through the manual carefully--it takes time since the documentation is excellent but dense, particularly for a Linux user who is not well versed in Linux administration

On Sun, Jun 16, 2024 at 10:42 PM Andy Tai <atai@atai.org> wrote:

My two cents: (I did not duplicate your issue and I do not want to try)

when you are running Guix in a foreign distribution, you may not want to have Guix active in your login shell by default... That may mess up your UI  environment,   Since you have issue with GDM, I assume you set up Guix to be active in your login shell script.   Avoid that.  Guix has its own glibc and your programs in the foreign distribution like GDM may misbehave if you have Guix libraries in the path.

I would run Guix GUI programs from a terminal once you log in to your desktop, then manually activating the Guix user profile first in the terminal.

This probably is not related specifically to g-golf.  Just my guess.