Guix

Chris Webber of MediaGoblin fame will be giving two talks for the Chicago GNU/Linux User Group meeting on September 30th. The first talk will discuss the state of federation on the Web, while the second one is entitled Functional Package Management and Deployment with Guix:

Tired of being stuck after an upgrade? Wish your operating system could roll forward and backwards in time, more like Git? Want a way to get really reproducible software? Or just want a better alternative to $YOUR_LANGUAGE's stressful packaging ecosystem you can run on an existing distro? And why on earth would you want something called a "symlink forest" anyway? Discover all this and more in this exciting talk about the GNU Guix project!

If you're in the Chicago area, do not miss Chris!

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.