Re: Distributing Guix System Pinebook Pro images

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>]

On 2021-08-30, Mathieu Othacehe wrote:
> I managed to build a Guix System image with the Sway WM for the Pinebook
> Pro. The image is quite large (~6GiB) but it is bootable and works fine.

I wonder how much diskspace savings you might get by leaving out the
display manager... I typically just login from the console and run "exec
sway". I *think* the last image I generated for that was more like 2GB,
though my memory is fallable, and maybe misses various other standard
desktop packages (e.g. web browser).


> The pinebook.scm file is attached.

    (initrd-modules '())
    (kernel linux-libre-arm64-generic)

I have since figured out how to use the regular "linux-libre" kernel and
which modules to add to the initrd... I'll try to dig those up.

> This is an interesting first step as generating desktop images for ARM
> devices is really convenient.

Indeed!


> Using the ARM machine as an offload machine to build a native ARM image
> from an Intel machine is less convenient though. I would really like to
> be able to build this same image using cross-compilation. The recent
> series sent by Maxime are making this goal more realistic.

Have fully native builds been fixed yet with "guix system image" ? That
has been a blocker forme from trying it out. I haven't been booting my
x86 guix installation lately, mostly just using the pinebook pro, so it
is ironic I haven't been able to make a pinebook pro image. :)


live well,
  vagrant