Planet Guix

How does Guix help in deploying complex HPC software stacks on supercomputers? A common misconception is that Guix helps if and only if it is installed on the target supercomputer. This would be a serious limitation since, to date, you may find Guix on a number of small- to medium-size clusters (“Tier-2”) but not yet on national and European supercomputers (“Tier-1” and “Tier-0”). While we boasted quite a few times about the use of guix pack to run benchmarks, one might wonder how much of it is applicable to more complex applications.

A few weeks ago I gave a lecture for the Spatial Ecology course to introduce a handful of junior and not-so-junior researchers from various domains to the not-so-nice world of scientific computing environments.

Around a year ago I wrote about Guix Container Images for GitLab CI/CD and these images have served the community well. Besides continous use in CI/CD, these Guix container images are used to confirm reproducibility of the source tarball artifacts in the releases of Libtasn1 v4.20, InetUtils v2.6, Libidn2 v2.3.8, Libidn v1.43, SASL v2.2.2, Guile-GnuTLS v5.0.1, and OATH Toolkit v2.6.13. See how all those release announcements mention a Guix commit? That’s the essential supply-chain information about the Guix build environment that allows the artifacts to be re-created. To make sure this is repeatable, the release tarball artifacts are re-created from source code every week in the verify-reproducible-artifacts project, that I wrote about earlier. Guix’s time travelling feature make this sustainable to maintain, and hopefully will continue to be able to reproduce the exact same tarball artifacts for years to come.

I am pleased to announce the availability of Planet Guix , an Atom and RSS aggregator covering all things Guix. You can browse posts on the website or use your favourite feed reader to subscribe to the aggregate feed . Planet Guix already has subscriptions to 19 blogs from around the community; if you write about Guix (no matter how infrequently) and would like your blog to be included, or if you would like to suggest another blog I missed, please create a pull request against the repository in Codeberg — you'll see that the subscriptions are simply configured as association…

Last week I published Guix on Debian container images that prepared for today’s announcement of Guix on Trisquel/Ubuntu container images.

The debian-with-guix-container project build and publish container images of Debian GNU/Linux stable with GNU Guix installed.

This past weekend, Guixotic participated in the FSF40 Hackathon, a Free Software Foundation (FSF) organized event in celebration of their 40th anniversary. The hackathon was held virtually over the course of three days via a Galene video conference server instance provided by the FSF, and the GNU Guix participants had a dedicated room.

There is a neat trick to make fonts on Linux look thicker and smoother and sharper. Set the following variable in <code>/etc/environment</code>:

It seems we are a bit overdue to say hello! We're very excited to announce Guixotic, a consultancy cooperative specializing in GNU Guix and Guile. We offer a wide range of services, from commercial support and DevOps to training and feature development. You can read our first announcement to the world on the guix-devel mailing list.

Yesterday, I got access to a virtual machine from my university for a school project. Great! The only catch: it was only accessible in the internal network via an obscure VPN protocol.