Re: Towards a graphical installer?

[Mathieu Othacehe]

Hello Tobias and Jonathan,

> Are you, for example, able to connect to a Wi-Fi network the Gnome way (not
> using the installer), without a Gnome authentication dialogue popping up that
> doesn't understand the notion of ‘no password’?  I had to open a terminal and
> ‘passwd’ myself out of that to continue.

No, I kept connman as the installer network-manager.

> Last time I brought this up someone mentioned using Calamares[0]. Not that I
> think that's a good idea, but it's another data point for discussion :-p

My main concern with Calamares, Anaconda & friends is that we will
inevitably have to write some Python/C++ to adapt it to Guix System
installation. Now that we have Guile code covering the whole
installation and associated automated tests, I would prefer not to use
those external tools.

> As much as I dislike Gnome, I think we should first try to use the (most
> likely) default desktop during the installation, and I do think that's
> currently Gnome.

I agree that even though GNOME is heavy and hard to configure, its also
probably to most popular DE.

To adapt the current installer to GNOME, we would need to:

* Switch from connman to NetworkManager.
* Add DBus bindings to control NetworkManager.
* Use 'setxkbmap' or a GNOME API to handle keyboard layout switching.
* Open the info page somewhere else than on TTY2, maybe in a
Web-browser.

Thanks,

Mathieu