Guix

GNU Guix and GuixSD 0.14.0 released

Ludovic Courtès — December 7, 2017

We are pleased to announce the new release of GNU Guix and GuixSD, version 0.14.0!

The release comes with GuixSD ISO-9660 installation images, a virtual machine image of GuixSD, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of your GNU/Linux distro, either from source or from binaries.

It’s been 6 months since the previous release, during which 88 people contributed code and packages. The highlights include:

• The GuixSD installation image is now available as an ISO-9660 image, which can either be written to a USB stick or burnt on a DVD. Previously we would only provide a USB stick image. This was long overdue! Such images can now be generated with guix system disk-image --file-system-type=iso9660.
• Several user interface improvements, notably: guix package reports how much is going to be downloaded, warns if the user has insufficient disk space, reports about package collisions early on; guix package --search sorts results by relevance, and there’s a new guix system search command to search for GuixSD system services; guix system reports incorrect file system labels and UUIDs and provides hints for unbound variables.
• GuixSD has a new bootloader API, which has allowed GuixSD to gain support not just for GRUB (UEFI and BIOS) but also U-Boot and Extlinux. This paves the way to a GuixSD port to ARM-based devices, which fearless hackers are soon going to make a reality!
• To make it easier for newcomers to get started defining packages, there’s a new guix import json command that takes JSON-formatted package metadata as input and produces the usual package definition.
• guix-daemon has a new --listen option, which is particularly useful when installing Guix on a cluster.
• There are 1,211 new packages—oh, and the package list as well as the whole web site have been revamped too, thanks to our intrepid web designer sirgazil.
• There’s a dozen new GuixSD services as well: git-http and cgit, libvirt, Memcached, and Murmur to name a few.
• Many bug fixes!

See the release announcement for details.

About GNU Guix

GNU Guix is a transactional 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, armv7, and aarch64.