Guix

We are pleased to announce the new beta release of GNU Guix and GuixSD, version 0.10.0!

The release comes with USB installation images to install the standalone GuixSD, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of a running GNU/Linux system, either from source or from binaries.

It’s been almost 5 months since the previous release, and many things happened! The highlights include:

• Our “grafting” mechanism for security updates has been fixed to be generally applicable. Read this post for more information on the challenges behind this.
• Substitutes are now fetched by default over HTTPS and from a faster mirror.
• A number of packages have been made bit-for-bit reproducible, including glibc, Perl, Emacs packages, and Python packages. This work was simplified by guix challenge and by the new --check and --rounds build options, and also by the insight gathered from other reproducible builds efforts.
• GNOME is now available, via the gnome-desktop-service procedure.
• 639 new packages, about as many package updates, greatly simplified by the addition of new importers and auto-updaters.
• A wealth of bug fixes, documentation improvements, Emacs niceties, and more!

See https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-03/msg01241.html for details.

About GNU Guix

GNU Guix is a functional package manager for the GNU system. The Guix System Distribution or GuixSD is an advanced distribution of the GNU system that relies on GNU Guix and respects the user's freedom.

In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. Guix uses low-level mechanisms from the Nix package manager, except that packages are defined as native Guile modules, using extensions to the Scheme language. GuixSD offers a declarative approach to operating system configuration management, and is highly customizable and hackable.

GuixSD can be used on an i686 or x86_64 machine. It is also possible to use Guix on top of an already installed GNU/Linux system, including on mips64el and armv7.