Guix on Windows?

Guix on Windows?

[zimoun]

Dear Guixers,

We are not the 1rst April and I am not joking. :-)

Context:
 1. I am working in a lab in the middle of people using Windows for
processing biological data. And they will never switch to any Linux
flavor.
 2. I was previously doing research in electrical engineering labs
(applied maths) and a lot of people were using Mac.
 3. Echoing the Guix Days session about spreading the world
(dominating for the optimistic ;-))

(To escape ethical issues, the same arguments "why GNU Emacs is
running on Windows" apply here.)


Well, to extend a bit, let also include Mac and BSD.


I remember old discussion on guix-devel about Guix on MacOS. And if I
remember well, the issue is that there is "cheat" somewhere because
the GLibc. What is the current status?


Debian did a interesting "proof-of-concept" with kfreebsd [1],
replacing the linux kernel by the FreeBSD one. Do you think it is a
viable option for Guix?


About Windows, Nix propose some information [2] using the Windows
Subsystem for Linux (WSL) [3] to run on it natively [4]. Is it
affordable for Guix?


Last, if it is too difficult or technically impossible, then what is
the status of the cross-compilation targeting these systems?


[1] https://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD
[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about?redirectedfrom=MSDN
[3] https://www.tweag.io/posts/2017-11-10-nix-on-wsl.html
[4] https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-on-windows/1113


Thank you in advance for any pointers and/or comment.


All the best,
simon

Re: Guix on Windows?

[david larsson]

Hi Zimoun,

I have almost run Guix successfully on the WSL version 1 using Kali 
linux. I found a repo on github that packaged a deb-package for Guix0.12 
or something, but it didnt work out of the box, but I managed to fix, 
package and install it. The problem was that I couldn't install any Guix 
packages, only run stuff like guix hash command. Something about the 
build-daemon and users and permissions I believe.

A WSL2 is in progress, which might solve these issues.


Maybe using a GuixSD virtual machine and mapping some Windows drives to 
GuixSD and using ntfs3g would be an option?

If you find a good solution, Ill be happy to hear about it as well.

Best regards,
David L

On 2020-02-07 11:06, zimoun wrote:
> Dear Guixers,
> 
> We are not the 1rst April and I am not joking. :-)
> 
> Context:
>  1. I am working in a lab in the middle of people using Windows for
> processing biological data. And they will never switch to any Linux
> flavor.
>  2. I was previously doing research in electrical engineering labs
> (applied maths) and a lot of people were using Mac.
>  3. Echoing the Guix Days session about spreading the world
> (dominating for the optimistic ;-))
> 
> (To escape ethical issues, the same arguments "why GNU Emacs is
> running on Windows" apply here.)
> 
> 
> Well, to extend a bit, let also include Mac and BSD.
> 
> 
> I remember old discussion on guix-devel about Guix on MacOS. And if I
> remember well, the issue is that there is "cheat" somewhere because
> the GLibc. What is the current status?
> 
> 
> Debian did a interesting "proof-of-concept" with kfreebsd [1],
> replacing the linux kernel by the FreeBSD one. Do you think it is a
> viable option for Guix?
> 
> 
> About Windows, Nix propose some information [2] using the Windows
> Subsystem for Linux (WSL) [3] to run on it natively [4]. Is it
> affordable for Guix?
> 
> 
> Last, if it is too difficult or technically impossible, then what is
> the status of the cross-compilation targeting these systems?
> 
> 
> [1] https://wiki.debian.org/Debian_GNU/kFreeBSD
> [2] 
> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about?redirectedfrom=MSDN
> [3] https://www.tweag.io/posts/2017-11-10-nix-on-wsl.html
> [4] https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nix-on-windows/1113
> 
> 
> Thank you in advance for any pointers and/or comment.
> 
> 
> All the best,
> simon