Guix on mobile phones

Guix on mobile phones

[W. T. Meyer]

Hi,

There were brief discussions on running Guix on mobile phones ~2y ago on
this mailing list. Even though it was mentioned that there may have been
efforts to run Guix on a pinephone (also being aware that there's an
image available for the pinebook pro which uses a similar SoC as the
pinephone pro), I haven't found a post of someone having a working Guix
set-up on mobile.

So I've been wondering if there have been any successful attempts on
either running Guix as a package manager on top of something like
postmarketOS or Guix System as a distribution?

I will probably try running Guix on my pinephone myself as soon as I
have a couple of hours to spare, but it'd be appreciated to hear if
anyone has been down this route before?

- Wilko

Re: Guix on mobile phones

[Caleb Herbert]

I hope there's a way to suppress compiling from source. I don't want to 
be compiling stuff on a mobile device.

-- 
Caleb Herbert
https://bluehome.net/csh/

Re: Guix on mobile phones

[W. T. Meyer]

Caleb Herbert <csh@bluehome.net> writes:

> I hope there's a way to suppress compiling from source. I don't want
> to be compiling stuff on a mobile device.

I think offloading build processes to another machine defined in
/etc/guix/machines.scm would be a more useful solution than to suppress
building things from source.

For initially provisioning a system one could probably try to make use
of guix system image to create an initial base image of Guix for a
respective mobile device to keep the amount of work to be done at said
device to a minimum.

- Wilko

Re: Guix on mobile phones

[Csepp]

"W. T. Meyer" <w@wmeyer.eu> writes:

> Caleb Herbert <csh@bluehome.net> writes:
>
>> I hope there's a way to suppress compiling from source. I don't want
>> to be compiling stuff on a mobile device.
>
> I think offloading build processes to another machine defined in
> /etc/guix/machines.scm would be a more useful solution than to suppress
> building things from source.
>
> For initially provisioning a system one could probably try to make use
> of guix system image to create an initial base image of Guix for a
> respective mobile device to keep the amount of work to be done at said
> device to a minimum.
>
> - Wilko

This assumes that everyone has access to an offload machine.
Based on my experience with Guix on a netbook, there absolutely needs to
be a way to disable building things locally.  There is no point in
wasting battery life, storage space, and bandwidth on eg. trying to
build Icecat on a machine with 1GB of RAM.
Either the upgrade should fail until all substitutes become available or
it should do a partial upgrade.

Re: Guix on mobile phones

[Felix Lechner via]

Hi Csepp,

On Wed, May 24, 2023 at 4:40 AM Csepp <raingloom@riseup.net> wrote:
>
> Either the upgrade should fail until all substitutes become available or
> it should do a partial upgrade.

Do Guix System or Guix Home offer such an adaptive resolver? I'd love
to have it!

Kind regards
Felix

Re: Guix on mobile phones

[Csepp]

Felix Lechner <felix.lechner@lease-up.com> writes:

> Hi Csepp,
>
> On Wed, May 24, 2023 at 4:40 AM Csepp <raingloom@riseup.net> wrote:
>>
>> Either the upgrade should fail until all substitutes become available or
>> it should do a partial upgrade.
>
> Do Guix System or Guix Home offer such an adaptive resolver? I'd love
> to have it!
>
> Kind regards
> Felix

As far as I know they do not.