Last week, from Monday to Tuesday was Guix days! Guix days is an
annual FOSDEM fringe event, where Guix hackers from Europe and
abroad meet. This year was my second time going, and I was waiting
for it all year! In this post, I’ll do a quick retrospective of what
happened, and my thoughts on it. Thanks to Futurile for suggesting
that I make this post :)
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.