Planet Guix

Up until a few months ago, I was working on a Ruby on Rails monolith. In the four years that I worked on the project, we went through a few ways of building a local development environment:

Guix-HPC is a collaborative effort to bring reproducible software deployment to scientific workflows and high-performance computing (HPC). Guix-HPC builds upon the GNU Guix software deployment tools and aims to make them useful for HPC practitioners and scientists concerned with dependency graph control and customization and, uniquely, reproducible research.

There was a session on running guix on weird computers during this years Guix Days, and five people brought their purple colored MNT Pocket Reform laptops with them, which proves two things in my book:

I've been daily driving my MNT Pocket Reform for a year now, but only recently managed to set-up Guix System earlier this January, after a year of failed attempts. As of a few weeks ago I've been running:

We are pleased to announce the release of GNU Guix version 1.5.0! The release comes with ISO-9660 installation images, virtual machine images, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of your GNU/Linux distro, either from source or from binaries—check out the download page . Guix users can update by running guix pull . It’s been 3 years since the previous release . That’s a lot of time, reflecting both the fact that, as a rolling release , users continuously get new features and update by running guix pull ; but it also shows a lack of…

It’s that time of the year again: next week is FOSDEM time! As in previous years , many Guix people will be in Brussels. Right after FOSDEM, about sixty of us will gather on February 2–3 for the Guix Days! First things first: Guix presence at FOSDEM. On Saturday, January 31st : In Name resolution in package management systems — A reproducibility perspective , Gábor Boskovits will look will look at how several package managers refer to packages and how this affects reproducibility. Simon Tournier will…

I’ve been using rsnapshot to take backups of around 10 servers and laptops for well over 15 years, and it is a remarkably reliable tool that has proven itself many times. Rsnapshot uses rsync over SSH and maintains a temporal hard-link file pool. Once rsnapshot is configured and running, on the backup server, you get a hardlink farm with directories like this for the remote server:

I lately dedicated some time to setting up my own substitute server for Guix on a foreign distribution. This post is about that experience, after verifying that such a process is currently quite underdocumented. A substitute server is clearly a required step in order to cultivate a personal or unofficial/alternative channel for Guix, at least if one has more than one box (and possibly one physical location) to manage.

How does the GNU Mes module system work and why it is crucial for all the work.

How does Guix help in deploying complex HPC software stacks on supercomputers? A common misconception is that Guix helps if and only if it is installed on the target supercomputer. This would be a serious limitation since, to date, you may find Guix on a number of small- to medium-size clusters (“Tier-2”) but not yet on national and European supercomputers (“Tier-1” and “Tier-0”). While we boasted quite a few times about the use of guix pack to run benchmarks, one might wonder how much of it is applicable to more complex applications.