Planet Guix

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.

The first Freenode #live conference happened on the weekend just passed (28th and 29th of October), and it was awesome but exhausting.

I’ve been working with Ruby professionally for over 3 years now and I’ve grown frustrated with two of its most popular development tools: RVM and Bundler. For those that may not know, RVM is the Ruby version manager and it allows unprivileged users to download, compile, install, and manage many versions of Ruby instead of being stuck with the one that is installed globally by your distro’s package manager. Bundler is the tool that allows developers to keep a version controlled “Gemfile” that specifies all of the project’s dependencies and provides utilities to install and update those gems. These tools are crucial because Ruby developers often work with many applications that use different versions of Ruby and/or different versions of gems such as Rails. Traditional GNU/Linux distributions install packages to the global /usr directory, limiting users to a single version of Ruby and associated gems, if they are packaged at all. Traditional package management fails to meet the needs of a lot of users, so many niche package managers have been developed to supplement them.