Upcoming Talk: "Everyday Use of GNU Guix"

Chris Marusich — September 29, 2018

At SeaGL 2018, Chris Marusich will present a talk introducing GNU Guix to people of all skill levels and backgrounds. SeaGL is an annual GNU/Linux conference in Seattle. Attendance is gratis.

If you're in the Seattle area, please consider coming! Even if you can't make it in person, the talk will be recorded and later made available on the SeaGL website, so you can watch it at your convenience after it's been uploaded.

Abstract

Everyday Use of GNU Guix

In this talk, I will introduce GNU Guix: a liberating, dependable, and hackable package manager that follows the "purely functional software deployment model" pioneered by Nix.

I will demonstrate some common use cases of Guix and show you how I use it in my everyday life. In addition, I will briefly explain the basic idea behind the functional model and how it enables Guix to provide useful features like the following:

• Transactional upgrades and roll-back of installed software.
• Unprivileged users can simultaneously install multiple versions of software.
• Transparently build from source or download pre-built binaries.
• Installed software is bootstrappable, trustable, and auditable all the way down to your compiler's compiler.
• Eliminates an entire class of "works on my system" type problems.

No prior knowledge of Guix, Nix, or the functional model is required. When you leave this talk, I hope you will have a basic understanding of what Guix is, how to use it, and why it will help make your life brighter.

Schedule

The talk will take place at the following time and location:

• Date: November 10th (Saturday), 2018
• Time: 13:30 local time
• Duration: 50 minutes
• Room Number: 5102
• Conference: Seattle GNU/Linux Conference 2018

For details, please refer to the official SeaGL page for the talk.

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, x86_64 and armv7 machines. It is also possible to use Guix on top of an already installed GNU/Linux system, including on mips64el and aarch64.