Hi, just to report that i did not forget this problem: I have now a qemu-system-i386 VM with Debian GNU/Linux from debian-9.6.0-i386-netinst.iso without desktop environment and reachable via SSH. Very minimal. (I only did "apt-get install build-essential" to feel not lonely without C compiler and friends.) Then i followed the instructions of https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/en/html_node/Binary-Installation.html with https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guix/guix-binary-0.16.0.i686-linux.tar.xz https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guix/guix-binary-0.16.0.i686-linux.tar.xz.sig up to step 7 ("guix archive --authorize ..."). Then i made the mistake to do the proposed guix package -i hello It downloads and builds and blows away the free space on the virtual 8 GB disk ... /gnu is growing steadily and /tmp breathes between 50 MB and 2 GB. I abort this after 100 minutes before the virtual disk gets too full and my CPU melts. "guix pull" happily begins to build that gcc-5.5.0 which is too much for my feeble VM. Back to step 0 ("rm -r /gnu /var/guix") and again to step 7. (A small fight starts between me and systemd, to get guix-daemon running. "start" did not help. It had to be "restart".) Then # guix system disk-image --file-system-type=iso9660 \ > -s i686-linux \ > ~/.config/guix/current/share/guile/site/2.2/gnu/system/install.scm and the activities to build the world start again. Extra verbose. This time i abort after 30 minutes. Everything i do ends up in enormous production of gcc-5.5.0 related software. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- So for xorriso and a 32-bit system: # apt-get install xorriso ... # xorriso -version xorriso 1.4.6 : RockRidge filesystem manipulator, libburnia project. ... I try what happens if i pack up the /gnu tree: # xorriso -as mkisofs -o /tmp/test.iso -J /gnu ... ISO image produced: 643046 sectors Written to medium : 643046 sectors at LBA 0 Writing to 'stdio:/tmp/test.iso' completed successfully. Inspection shows that the size ideas of xorriso match the image file size: # xorriso -indev /tmp/test.iso ... no warning about size mismatch ... Media summary: 1 session, 643046 data blocks, 1256m data, 3234m free # ls -l /tmp/test.iso -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1316958208 Dec 15 19:17 /tmp/test.iso # expr 1316958208 / 2048 643046 Now with GNU xorriso 1.5.0: $ wget https://www.gnu.org/software/xorriso/xorriso-1.5.0.tar.gz ... $ tar xzf xorriso-1.5.0.tar.gz $ cd xorriso-1.5.0 $ ./configure && make ... $ xorriso/xorriso -version GNU xorriso 1.5.0 : RockRidge filesystem manipulator, libburnia project. ... # rm /tmp/test.iso # xorriso/xorriso -as mkisofs -o /tmp/test.iso -J /gnu GNU xorriso 1.5.0 : RockRidge filesystem manipulator, libburnia project. ... ISO image produced: 643046 sectors Written to medium : 643046 sectors at LBA 0 ... Inspection yields the same result. No truncation. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- If i shall try again with "guix system disk-image", then i need more guidance. E.g. about the required disk size and ways to curb the build effort. Have a nice day :) Thomas