system for a 32 bit intel pentium m computer?
pentium m
32 bit
Suggestions for a software system, which
supports full system encryption?
Thank you.
I think that Guix is the only FSF approved distro left that still supports 32-bit systems. I have no idea if your system would meet the minimum system requirements for Guix, and I can't find them on the Guix website. It seems to require some beefy hardware, as you have to do a huge amount of work (including compiling in some cases) to get new packages loaded on your system.
Hyperbola supports 32-bit systems, but its packages are years out of date and it's possibly no longer safe to use it online.
Your best bet may be GNUinOS, which is not FSF endorsed yet, but is all free software. It supports 32-bit and it should support full disk encryption, since its parent distro Devuan supports full-disk encryption.
> I have no idea if your system would meet the minimum system requirements for Guix, and I can't find them on the Guix website. It seems to require some beefy hardware, as you have to do a huge amount of work (including compiling in some cases) to get new packages loaded on your system.
Compiling might indeed be a problem sometimes — e.g. when you need to modify some packages or the Guix build farms have not yet built some new package that you need.
One workaround would be to set up one's own build server (on some other, stronger machine) and configure the 32-bit system to offload builds to there. This is also what some people on ARM do.
Unfortunately, Guix on non-x86_64 platforms lacks Rust and Gnome (due to some technical issues involved)
I am a translator!
> I think that Guix is the only FSF approved distro left that still supports 32-bit systems.
I tried installing it a few days ago on an old netbook, the installer failed at some point and it wasn't possible to resume installation. I started again from scratch and it failed exactly at the same point.
I installed debian and saw that I had two non-free packages, even though that netbook used to work fine with etiona. I don't know whether there is a way to install debian without that.
> Your best bet may be GNUinOS
I looked at the website but did not understand how to install it. The home page is talking about things that I don't understand at all, perhaps it is only understandable for people who know devuan?
My intention is to install parabola again. Graphical xmpp clients were not working but profanity (client running in a terminal) looks really good so I plan to spend more time learning its usage. Also, I'd like to configure a terminal client for email.
The only thing that does not work well enough in text-mode is web browsers. Even trisquel website is really unpleasant with lynx or elinks. Firefox derivatives take too much resources for my netbook, I need to find something else.
> I looked at the website but did not understand how to install it.
You can pick an iso image there and create a live system exactly as you would do for Trisquel:
I've been using the newer Daedalus versions for awhile instead of Chimaera: https://www.gnuinos.org/mirror/daedalus/live/
Seem to work better for me.
Both are currently working fine for me, although I too am aiming to brush off chimaeras and get into the security of the labyrinth.
Keep in mind that both are beta releases. Beyond being fully free, Gnuinos ships with several improvements over its Devuan base, which may take some time to fine tune, during which time the officially "unstable" version (currently Daedalus) may seem to be "working better", because it has not been having any of these tweaks going on. So it is exactly a fully free version of Devuan until those extra improvements are made. Or such has been my experience.
> two non-free packages
which are they?
> way to install debian without that
When the debian install menu displays, then press e. Enter
firmware=never before --- quiet.
Press ctrl + x.
If the debian install menu displays a help option
then select it. Then select special boot parameters for the
install system. Then enter
install firmware=never.
During installation console productivity and
system utilities were selected. But after
installing and starting gnuinos no graphical user
interface started. Instead it says missing modules cat proc modules ls
dev Alert dev mapper vg root does not exist dropping to
shell.
And a initramfs prompt displays.
Is that about my computer or do you not
get a graphical user interface?
It may be the computer not meeting
requirements. Debian 12 gets installed. And starts. But
all the time debian 12 crashes into the log in screen.
I made a "Libre" respin version of antiX 21 last year, removing the non-free firmware and the non-free repos and switching to Abrowser and Linux-libre. The PAE enabled 32-bit version is here: https://archive.org/details/antiX21LibreRespin32bitPAEwAbrowser
If it will run you could install it and install updates and that version would still be supported for a few years probably.
If that doesn't work you may have to try one of the Puppy distros or an older version of Debian like Jessie or Stretch or Buster.
I understand that there is work in progress to have Trisquel on 32-bit systems again but there's no timeframe.
I'm very glad to hear this as Trisquel user, Jason. Thank you Trisquel Developers.
Sincerely yours,
Malsasa