On Wed, 6 Apr 2022 22:20:36 +0200 raingloom <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Apr 2022 14:43:57 -0700 > Andy Tai <[email protected]> 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.)
