News from the Planet

I've been meaning to write up a post on how I manage my Guix System configurations for a while, because I've hit on a solution that feels kinda nice, inspired by how folks do things in NixOS.

Recently I've been trying to get a PR merged with some fixes for Lua. I thought this would be a pretty straightforward thing to merge, but it turns out that modifying the Lua packages leads to 990 packages needing to be rebuilt. This is more than the 300 limit for a merge to master, so instead of…

When I saw Jensen Huang introduce the Reachy Mini at CES, I thought it was a gimmick. His keynote showed this little robot responding to human input, turning its head to look at a TODO list on the wall, sending emails, and turning drawings into architectural renderings with motion. HuggingFace…

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…

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:

In October, my Dad and I got to go behind the scenes at two St. Louis Blues (NHL hockey) games, and observe the massive team effort involved in putting together a modern digital sports broadcast. I wanted to explore the timing and digital side of a modern SMPTE 2110 mobile unit, and my Dad has…

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…

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:

Hello! One of my favourite things is starting to learn an Old Boring Technology that I’ve never tried before but that has been around for 20+ years. It feels really good when every problem I’m ever going to have has been solved already 1000 times and I can just get stuff done easily. I’ve thought it…

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:

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…

Hello! This past fall, I decided to take some time to work on Git’s documentation. I’ve been thinking about working on open source docs for a long time – usually if I think the documentation for something could be improved, I’ll write a blog post or a zine or something. But this time I wondered:…

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…

How does the GNU Mes module system work and why it is crucial for all the work.

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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.

Guile Load Path is a place (or more precisely places), where Guile looks for the source code. This is the first thing one needs to set correctly to work on a Guile Scheme project. It makes Guile aware both of your own modules and external dependencies. For more details refer to Load Paths page in…

A blog post documented an elegant way to configure screenshots in wayland using grim and grimshot. After moving my sway config to use the GUIX sway-service to generate the config file Iost my configured screenshot bindings.