Guix

We are pleased to announce the next alpha release of GNU Guix, version 0.8.

The release comes both with a source tarball, which allows you to install it on top a running GNU/Linux system, and a USB installation image to install the standalone operating system.

The highlights for this release include:

• A new guix environment command for the bookkeeping and reproduction of development environments.
• An Emacs user interface as an alternative to the command-line interface for package management.
• An experimental mechanism for faster deployment of security updates.
• operating-system declarations can now specify swap devices, mapped devices, firmware, and more.
• More developer tools, notably guix lint and guix import.
• 162 packages have been added, with more than 100 package updates.

See the original announcement for details.

About GNU Guix

GNU Guix is the functional package manager for the GNU system, and a distribution thereof.

In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. It also offers a declarative approach to operating system configuration management. Guix uses low-level mechanisms from the Nix package manager, with Guile Scheme programming interfaces.

At this stage the distribution 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.