Re: GuixSD and free hardware

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Gammel Holte writes:

> Hello everyone,
>
> as a user, I've joined Guix due to technical reasons (functional package
> management in Scheme) and focus on freedom (linux-libre kernel, etc). I
> guess many people here share these values.
>
> Freedom ultimately depends on the underlying hardware too. My goal is to do
> all my computing on devices that respect my freedom. Right now, this is
> mostly possible using rather old machines (e.g., MacBook 2,1 or Nokia N900)
> which bothers me a bit (hardware is slow and increasingly hard to buy).
>
> I would like to draw your attention to new Rockchip ARM machines (e.g. Asus
> C201). These are very cheap, easy to reflash and can be run without any
> blobs (except 3D acceleration, unless the Lima driver gets finished). They
> don't even need CPU microcdes. Paul Kocialkowski (of Replicant fame)
> recently added Libreboot support to the C201 [1].
>
> In my opinion, it'd be really nice to have GuixSD polished on this
> architecture, so that users can buy one and get things going with minimal
> effort. Sort of a few reference devices like what BSD does with some
> Thinkpads. If running linux-libre, and wishing to have libreboot as a
> bootloader, there are not that many choices.
>
> There are also 2 devices (yet to be released) that might be fantastic to
> get GuixSD running on mobile phones: DragonBox Pyra [2] and Neo900 [3].
>
> Cheers.
>
> [1] http://www.libreboot.org/docs/hcl/c201.html
> [2] https://boards.openpandora.org/pyramain/main/
> [3] http://neo900.org/

Along these lines, it might be interesting if we can get more of the
guix "core" packages in Guix paired down in size.  It's unlikely that
I'm going to be building packages on a neo900 or etc, but I might want
all my small devices in my house to be running Guix, in an ideal world.
I think if I can build the profiles for all my devices and then splat
them across my network, that might be pretty great.  Obviously the "guix
deploy" stuff will help there (sorry, yes, I will be getting to helping
on it soon...) but iirc many of our base packages are pretty large,
mostly because they contain more manuals and etc than needed.

In other words, imagine a future where people really do have many small
"smart devices" (I hate that term, but less bad than "internet of
things", which I have perma-mapped to "internet of someone else's
things" now)... or rather, it's hard to not imagine this situation
growing.  It would be nice if my neo900 and other things could
eventually run Guix, rather than some one-off distro.

I wonder how far off from that world we are?

Sorry if the above was a bit much of a ramble :)