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Guix: easily run Linux binaries

Written by Solène, on 10 June 2021.
Tags: #guix

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Table of contents

1. Introduction §

For those who used Guix or Nixos you may know that running a binary downloaded from the internet will fail, this is because most expected paths are different than the usual Linux distributions.

I wrote a simple utility to help fixing that, I called it "guix-linux-run", inspired by the "steam-run" command from NixOS (although it has no relation to Steam).

Gitlab project guix-linux-run

2. How to use §

Clone the git repository and make the command linux-run executable, install packages gcc-objc++:lib and gtk+ (more may be required later).

Call "~/guix-linux-run/linux-run ./some_binary" and enjoy.

If you get an error message like "libfoobar" is not available, try to install it with the package manager and try again, this is simply because the binary is trying to use a library that is not available in your library path.

In the project I wrote a simple compatibility list from a few experiments, unfortunately it doesn't run everything and I still have to understand why, but it permitted me to play a few games from itch.io so it's a start.