Guix

Meet Guix at FOSDEM

Ludovic Courtès — 2021-02-02

As usual, GNU Guix will be present at FOSDEM on February 6th and 7th. Due to the pandemic, this year’s edition takes place on-line. The downside is that we’ll miss beautiful Brussels, but on the up side hopefully people who cannot join physically will be able to attend this year, and the event’s carbon footprint will be much lower.

We’re happy to say that there will be several talks about Guix and related projects!

• Saturday afternoon, Guix Workflow Language — Extending a reproducible software deployment system for HPC by Ricardo Wurmus, in the high-performance computing (HPC) track, will introduce the Guix Workflow Language and discuss the state of workflow languages.

Sunday, the Declarative and Minimalistic Computing track will be home to several Guix talks:

• Around noon, GNU Mes: the Full Source Bootstrap — The missing link between stage0/M2-Planet and Mes by Jan “janneke” Nieuwenhuizen will present the latest advances in bootstrapping: building the root of the Guix package collection entirely from source!
• Early in the afternoon, Declaratively yours — Composing system abstractions with GNU Guix by Ludovic Courtès will present how Guix takes advantage of its declarative structure, showcasing concrete examples.
• Is GNU Guix a minimal distribution, and what might that even mean? by Christopher Baines will reflect on what minimalism means for distributions and how it might apply to Guix.

Do not miss all the other exciting talks in this track, some by Guile and Guix hackers!

For the fourth time, we are also organizing a FOSDEM fringe event on Monday, February 8th, a one-day Guix workshop where contributors and enthusiasts will meet, on-line. Being an on-line event, we hope to attract people (maybe you?) who wouldn’t have come to the in-person meeting but will be happy to learn about what’s cooking in Guix and share their experience, needs, and ideas.

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 only a few seats left!). Join our BigBlueButton instance on Monday 8th, and check out the workshop’s wiki page for practical info. Hope to see you on-line!

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, and AArch64 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.