Planet Guix

We are delighted to announce that the second reduction by 50% of the Guix bootstrap binaries has now been officially released!

Recent ElenQ Technology donation to the great GNU Guix package manager and software distribution

Below is the recipe of how I hacked to boot into a GNU Guix root on a Pinebook Pro, using the default kernel provided with the Debian image.

Some notes on interactive fiction/text adventure games and PATHs in Guix, and StumpWM.

I travelled to Paris over the last week for the Reproducible Builds workshop there, as well as a GNU Guix meetup on the day before. All in all, it's been awesome, if a little tiring.

I grew up playing Infocom, Magnetic Scrolls, and Level 9 text adventures, with the Zork trilogy, the Enchanter trilogy, Planetfall, Wishbringer, The Guild of Thieves, The Pawn, Knight Orc, and Silicon Dreams being particularly prominent in my memory (somewhat re-activated through recent listening to the Eaten by a Grue podcast). I would have played all of these on an Atari 8bit or ST computer, and didn’t have any access to anything like a mainframe, and so never actually played the original Zork, which was written in the Lisp-derived MDL language (which formed the basis for the MDL-subset Infocom-specific ZIL language used for their subsequent offerings) for the DEC PDP-10.

So GuixSD doesn’t currently package Firefox (though hopefully that is changing), but only IceCat (which is now EOL). On freenode#guix, pkill9 suggested that Firefox (and Chromium etc.) could be installed on Guix via the Nix installer (install as per instructions on their site and then nix-env -i firefox) with the following trick, create a file ~/.local/bin/firefox with the following content:

So I finally made a serious go of running GuixSD, a GNU Linux distro which is largely built on GNU Guile Scheme (a dialect of Lisp) on one of my machines (one I had actually put together with GuixSD in mind: an X200 Thinkpad, which I Libreboot‘ed and put a Atheros Wi-Fi card in), and, to increase both the quantity and variety of Lisps involved, am trying to use with StumpWM (which is written in Common Lisp).

If you're in the Cambridge, MA area or already planning to attend the LibrePlanet 2018 free software conference, come learn about functional package management at my talk: Practical, verifiable software freedom with GuixSD.