Planet Guix

Guix days 2026 retrospective

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 :)

Guix-HPC Activity Report, 2025

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.

GNU Guix 1.5.0 released

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…

Meet Guix at FOSDEM

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…

Backup of S3 Objects Using rsnapshot

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:

Creating your own Guix substitute 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.