Planet Guix

Last Monday I sent an update essentially saying $Subject:

A lot has happened since our Hello Hurd post beginning of April. No, not nearly as much as we joked on April 1st , but more than enough to share and be proud of.

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

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).