Re: Guix on 32-bit x86 systems

[raingloom]

On Wed, 6 Apr 2022 22:20:36 +0200
raingloom <raingloom@riseup.net> wrote:

> On Tue, 5 Apr 2022 14:43:57 -0700
> Andy Tai <atai@atai.org> wrote:
> 
> > Hi, I wonder do people recommend running Guix as the primary OS on
> > 32-bit x86 systems?  I have some old 32-bit 80x86 (Pentium) PCs that
> > were running Fedora and of course Fedora had dropped support for
> > 32-bit x86 some time ago.
> > 
> > I am curious how would Guix work on such hardware.   These old PCs
> > may have memory of 4 GB or less.  Would that be an issue for
> > running Guix as Guix tries to build software from sources and the
> > build  process may not be possible on systems without much RAM.
> > Thanks for info on this
> >   
> 
> Building large software is definitely an issue, but I think this is
> basically the same problem that ARM systems have.
> 
> I managed to run a very bare bones Guix on an old Pentium II PC once,
> guix pull was very slow, but the main problem was that it only had 4
> gigs of storage.
> 
> You can always offload builds to a more powerful machine, or wait for
> the substitute server to catch up.
> 
> Even pulling should be faster nowadays, since now we have the
> channel-with-substitutes thing, or whatever it's called, so it will
> only pull the channel if substitutes are available for the guix part.
> Note that that does not mean they are available for whatever packages
> are in your profile(s).
> 
> Also if it's a really old system, you might need to compile your own
> kernel without PAE. That can take a while and it's not something
> you'll want to do on an old machine if you can avoid it. Might be a
> good idea to create a custom kernel config that only builds the
> modules you will actually need.
> 

I'm actually going to convert my Windows netbook into a Guix one soon,
so stay tuned for an experience report.
It's too slow for substantial Windows dev, so I'm curious how Guix
fares.
(Might also try NetBSD on it too.)