Guix

Meet Guix at FOSDEM

Ludovic Courtès — 2022-02-02

As usual, GNU Guix will be present at FOSDEM this week-end, February 5th and 6th. Due to the pandemic, FOSDEM takes place on-line for the second year, but we’re confident the wires will be able carry enthusiasm to the homes of the thousands of attendees.

This year’s a bit special: we’re celebrating 10 years of Guix, including 8 years sharing our excitement at FOSDEM! This edition will also bring you several talks about Guix and related projects.

• Sunday morning, in the distributions track, co-maintainer and long-time hacker Mathieu Othacehe will present “Unify your distributions — How GNU Guix can run on any of your hardware”

The other talks will take place on Sunday as well, in the now traditional track on declarative and minimalistic computing:

• “A year of RISC-V adventures: embracing chaos in your software journey” will be Ekaitz Zarraga’s account of the work porting GNU Guile, stage0, and GNU Mes to RISC-V, which will be instrumental in improving the RISC-V port of Guix.
• With “Declare All Your Needs — Managing computing environment declaratively using GNU Guix”, Andrew Tropin will show how you can declare your whole computing environment using Guix System, Guix Home, and rde.
• In “GNU Guix behind the scene — Continuous integration for the GNU Guix project”, Mathieu Othacehe will show what’s happening in the backyard of Guix’s build farm.
• “Concise Common Workflow Language — Concision and elegance in a workflow language using Lisp” will be Arun Isaac presenting the all new ccwl, a Guile domain-specific language (DSL) to define scientific workflows.

But let’s be clear: there are other exciting talks in this track, some of which closely related to Guix and Guile, so do not miss out!

As in previous years, we are also organizing a two-day on-line event two weeks after FOSDEM. If you’d like to share what you’ve done with Guix or in Guix, if you have packaging stories from the trenches, there’s one week left to submit a talk. At any rate, whether you’re simply curious about Guix or whether you’re already deep into, we hope to see you on February, 19–20!

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.