Re: Anyone running Guix on the pinephone?

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>]

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On 2021-05-02, Christopher Lemmer Webber wrote:
> Joshua Branson writes:
>> Christopher Lemmer Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org> writes:
>>
>>> I see the cookbook now mentions the possibility of running Guix on a
>>> pinephone... is anyone actually doing it?  Mind posting your experiences
>>> and setup?
>>>
>>> (Doesn't have to be as a phone necessarily... I'm more interested in
>>> using it as a lightweight portable computer.  But a phone would be nice
>>> too.)
>>
>> Is a pine phone good enough for a portable and personal computer?
>> Doesn't it only have 2GB?  I was starting to run into RAM issues with
>> 4GB when I was using Gnome.  Now I have 8GB and I am running sway.  No
>> RAM issues anymore.
>>
>> Just out of curiosity, how would you deal with RAM issues/slow CPU
>> issues on a pinephone?  Using a lightweight window manager and only run
>> Emacs?  :)
>
> Sure, why not? ;)
>
> It wasn't actually too long ago that my main computer only had 2GB of
> ram...

Some pinephones have 3GB of ram, too, which gives a little breathing
room.

It's very similar specifications to the (older) pinebook, which runs
guix system ok (considering, of course, it is slow), but you'll need to
significantly patch the kernel and bootloader until support lands
upstream...

You could surely run guix on one of the foreign distro images.

One of the main problems will be screen resolution and size issues; many
applications do not render well on a phone-sized screen. There is a list
of applications and rough ratings for their usability on the pinephone
with mobian:

  https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php?id=apps

Incorporating some of those into guix wouldn't probably be terribly
hard.

The main user interface for mobian is phosh, which is a gnome-shell
alternative targeted at mobile devices; runs well on the pinephone
despite the low hardware specs. I presume it would be plausible to get
that and related software into guix, though I don't know what gnome
versions it depends on.

Getting a decent on-screen keyboard will also be essential; squeekboard
is pretty configurable, though it's written in rust, and rust's long
bootstrap chain may make it impractical on aarch64, if it works at all.

I suspect it would be feasible to create a mobian-like experience with
guix; it's *just* a matter of packaging the right software and finding
the time to do it! :)

Count me interested, if cautious at taking on too many side
projects... :)


Before I tackle that, I think I'll try to get some decent aarch64 build
machines available and running locally, and make guix publish results
available somehow to the world at large... doing anything on aarch64 is
a bit painful until substitute availability is more workable.


live well,
  vagrant

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