Planet Guix

Guix package structure: overview and source/origin inputs

I've been running my trusty Raspberry Pi Single-Board Computer as a DNS, DHCP and Gitolite-Server at home since around 2016. It's been running on a minimal Raspbian and later on NixOS image, but I always wanted to switch it over to Guix System, to be able to do most of the configuration of my small server in Guile using Guixes tooling for maintenance and systems administration. I'll briefly describe what I did to succesfully boot Guix System in the following. I won't talk about the actual usage of Guix as a DNS, DHCP and Gitolite-Server on a Raspberry Pi for now, but eventually will cover these aspects later.

We are pleased to publish the sixth Guix-HPC annual report. Launched in 2017, 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 tool to empower HPC practitioners and scientists who need reliability, flexibility, and reproducibility; it aims to support Open Science and reproducible research.

About my personal FOSDEM 2024 experience and Guix Days

Today I’m excited to announce the launch of the new System Crafters Forum!

We have some exciting news to share: AMD has just contributed 100+ Guix packages adding several versions of the whole HIP and ROCm stack! ROCm is AMD’s Radeon Open Compute Platform, a set of low-level support tools for general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPUs), and HIP is the Heterogeneous Interface for Portability, a language one can use to write code (computational kernels) targeting GPUs or CPUs. The whole stack is free and “open source” software—a breath of fresh air!—and is seeing increasing adoption in HPC. And, it can now be deployed with Guix!

Back in November, the First Workshop on Reproducible Software Environments for Research and High-Performance Computing was held in Montpellier, France. Coming from France primarily but also from Czechia, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Spain, and the United Kingdom to name a few, 120 people—scientists, high-performance computing (HPC) practitioners, system administrators, and enthusiasts alike—came to listen to the talks, attend the tutorials, and talk to one another.

This post is about using Guix for the provisioning and management of cloud machines and services. Beyond the official documentation, there are various great tutorials around this topic already, like this one, this one, or this other one. I'm writing this up primarily as a note-to-self, and in case my specific approach can be of interest to anyone else.

Modifications to guix packages using inheritance

Dealing with secrets in functional operating systems can range from pretty usable to complete hell. Nix has several answers to this problem, the more integrated of which appears to be sops-nix. After spending some months envying our neighbors grass, I figured it was time for Guix to have its own (attempt at an) answer to the secrets problem.