Guix

Meet Guix at FOSDEM

Ludovic Courtès — 23 janvier 2023

GNU Guix will be present at FOSDEM next week, February 4th and 5th. This is the first time since the pandemic that FOSDEM takes place again “in the flesh” in Brussels, which is exciting to those of us lucky enough to get there! Everything will be live-streamed and recorded thanks to the amazing FOSDEM crew, so everyone can enjoy wherever they are; some of the talks this year will be “remote” too: pre-recorded videos followed by live Q&A sessions with the speaker.

Believe it or not, it’s the 9th year Guix is represented at FOSDEM, with more than 30 talks given in past editions! This year brings several talks that will let you learn more about different areas of the joyful Hydra Guix has become.

This all starts on Saturday, in particular with the amazing declarative and minimalistic computing track:

• “Bringing RISC-V to Guix's bootstrap” (remote), as a continuation of last year’s talk, will be Ekaitz Zarraga’s account of the successful port the full-source bootstrap to RISC-V—no less!
• In “Using GNU Guix Containers with FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard) Support” (remote) John Kehayias will present the recently-added guix shell --container --emulate-fhs.
• “Declaring just what is necessary” (remote) will show how to create system images that contain just what you need, by Efraim Flashner.
• In “GNU Guix and Open Science, a crush?”, Simon Tournier will illustrates ways in which Guix can be beneficial to “open science”.
• “How Replicant, a 100% free software Android distribution, uses (or doesn't use) Guix” will showcase an unusual and exciting use case for Guix, by one of Replicant’s core developers, Denis “GNUtoo” Carikli.
• “An Introduction to Guix Home” will be given on Sunday (remote) by David Wilson of System Crafters fame—a must if you want to understand this newfangled Guix Home thing!

There are many other exciting talks in this track, some of which closely related to Guix and Guile; check it out!

You can also discover Guix in other tracks:

• On Saturday, “Guix, toward practical transparent, verifiable and long-term reproducible research” will be an introduction to Guix (by Simon Tournier) for an audience of scientists interested in coming up with scientific practices that improves verifiability and transparency.
• On Saturday in the security track, “Where does that code come from?” (by Ludovic Courtès) will talk Git checkout authentication in Guix and how this fits in the broader picture of “software supply chain” security.
• On Sunday, Efraim Flashner will talk about “Porting RISC-V to GNU Guix” in the RISC-V track.
• On Sunday, in the high-performance computing (HPC) track, Ludovic Courtès will give a lightning talk about CPU tuning in Guix entitled “Reproducibility and performance: why choose?”.

As was the case pre-pandemic, we are also organizing the Guix Days as a FOSDEM fringe event, a two-day Guix workshop where contributors and enthusiasts will meet. The workshop takes place on Thursday Feb. 2nd and Friday Feb. 3rd at the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICAB) in Brussels.

Again this year there will be few talks; instead, the event will consist primarily of “unconference-style” sessions focused on specific hot topics about Guix, the Shepherd, continuous integration, and related tools and workflows.

Attendance to the workshop is free and open to everyone, though you are invited to register (there are few seats left!). Check out the workshop’s wiki page for registration and practical info. Hope to see you in Brussels!

About GNU Guix

GNU Guix is a transactional package manager and an advanced distribution of the GNU system that respects user freedom. Guix can be used on top of any system running the Hurd or the Linux kernel, or it can be used as a standalone operating system distribution for i686, x86_64, ARMv7, AArch64, and POWER9 machines.

In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. When used as a standalone GNU/Linux distribution, Guix offers a declarative, stateless approach to operating system configuration management. Guix is highly customizable and hackable through Guile programming interfaces and extensions to the Scheme language.