Guix

Meet Guix at FOSDEM

Ludovic Courtès — 2018-01-29

GNU Guix will be present at FOSDEM in the coming days with a couple of talks:

• The many ways of using Guix packages on Saturday afternoon, in the “package management” track, will be a guide to which ways might suit you, by Christopher Baines.
• On Sunday morning, in the “high-performance computing” track, I will give a talk entitled Tying software deployment to scientific workflows. I will explain how Guix can be thought of as a programming language extension that can be used to make software deployment a first-class citizen, as illustrated by the Guix Workflow Language, and how this fits with our vision for HPC.

We are also organizing a one-day Guix workshop where contributors and enthusiasts will meet, thanks to the efforts of Manolis Ragkousis and Pjotr Prins. The workshop takes place on Friday Feb. 2nd at the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICAB) in Brussels. The morning will be dedicated to talks—among other things, we are happy to welcome Eelco Dolstra, the founder of Nix, without which Guix would not exist today. The afternoon will be a more informal discussion and hacking session.

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

About GNU Guix

GNU Guix is a transactional 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, x86_64 and armv7 machines. It is also possible to use Guix on top of an already installed GNU/Linux system, including on mips64el and aarch64.