News from the Planet

How to seek, detect, be notified, analyze logs, understand and react to the different possible kind of issues one may encounter in a digital design is a vast topic of research, well beyond the scope of this modest post. But there are a couple of things we may state about here, though: automatizing…

Creating something new from scratch implies a certain ratio of unpredictable issues (loosely defined in the scope of this post: new errors, regressions, warnings, ... any unexpected behavior one may encounter). Most important, a digital design developer needs to define somehow what he considers to…

Guix reveals as a practical means of handling dependencies. However, the amount of information available to start using it may appear as a bit overwhelming for a beginner, letting the feeling of a tool reserved to a reduced community or experts. Far from that. Here you’ll find everything you need to…

Here’s a niche terminal problem that has bothered me for years but that I never really understood until a few weeks ago. Let’s say you’re running this command to watch for some specific output in a log file: tail -f /some/log/file | grep thing1 | grep thing2 If log lines are being added to the file…

A lot has happened with respect to the Hurd since our Childhurds and GNU/Hurd Substitutes post. As long as two years ago some of you have been asking for a progress update and although there have been rumours on a new blog post for over a year, we were kind of waiting for the rumoured…

High-speed network interconnects are a key component of supercomputers. The challenge from a software packaging viewpoint is to provide an MPI stack able to get the performance out of that specialized networking hardware. As packagers, our approach has been to provide MPI packages that get the best…

I like writing Javascript without a build system and for the millionth time yesterday I ran into a problem where I needed to figure out how to import a Javascript library in my code without using a build system, and it took FOREVER to figure out how to import it because the library’s setup…

We are pleased to announce Guix-Jupyter 0.3.0, a long-overdue release of our Guix-powered Jupyter kernel for self-contained and reproducible notebooks.

I added a new section to this site a couple weeks ago called TIL (“today I learned”). the goal: save interesting tools & facts I posted on social media One kind of thing I like to post on Mastodon/Bluesky is “hey, here’s a cool thing”, like the great SQLite repl litecli, or the fact that cross…

Hello! I’ve been thinking about the terminal a lot and yesterday I got curious about all these “control codes”, like Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-W, etc. What’s the deal with all of them? a table of ASCII control characters Here’s a table of all 33 ASCII control characters, and what they do on my machine…

I’ve been having problems for the last 3 years or so where Mess With DNS periodically runs out of memory and gets OOM killed. This hasn’t been a big priority for me: usually it just goes down for a few minutes while it restarts, and it only happens once a day at most, so I’ve just been ignoring. But…

In a previous post I mentioned the way I use Emacs Org code blocks and the so-called Noweb syntax as a templating mechanism. The idea is to have a template version of a document containing a certain number of placeholders and a separate file to store the placeholders' values. The template and the…

Warning: this is a post about very boring yakshaving, probably only of interest to people who are trying to upgrade Hugo from a very old version to a new version. But what are blogs for if not documenting one’s very boring yakshaves from time to time? So yesterday I decided to try to upgrade Hugo.…

I've been noodling on structural editing for a while now. I'm fully bought into Lisps myself, but most of my friends and coworkers are skeptical, and I think a lot of their skepticism has to do (as usual) with all the parens. One of the points I make frequently is that with Lisp code being written…

People from Guix London gave me the chance to describe this process.

It is specifically convenient using Guix-the-system within a foreign distribution, such as Debian, for development and tests. The package management system can be used on top of the system, but I find it quite interesting to explore the potential of the Guix distribution in the context of…

Let's give a second look at Guix-the-system the main GNU Project distribution I dealt with in a previous post. This post is not specifically limited to the distribution, it is also of interest when using Guix in a foreign distribution, even if some configuration details change.

Docker is known to have less than optimal security defaults, hence the hype for Podman. If you want to run rootless containers in your Guix System, it is sufficient to add the following to your operating-system configuration.

In the last few days, I got familiar with Guix, which is both a modern package management system and the main GNU Project distribution for Linux and Hurd (the Guix system). As a package management system, it can be installed on most foreign distributions, including Debian and any other, as an…

Samba or CIFS file sharing is a finicky area at best, but widely used, especially since it was heavily pushed by Microsoft in the Windows ecosystem, This makes it widely used in corporate and NAS environments and even for Linux file sharing.

Having promoted Guix as one of the tools to support reproducible research workflows, we are happy that it is now officially presented as one way to produce and review software artifacts that accompany articles submitted to SuperComputing 2024 (SC24), the leading HPC conference. In this post we look…

Guix package structure: build phases and using modify-phases

In the first part of this post, last month, I described my attempt at using my Guix home server as a virtualisation environment. With a clever use of the Guile programming language (haha, really, by copying other people's code from the internet!) I was able to set up a small number of services, each…

After rebuilding all added/modified packages in Trisquel, I have been circling around the elephant in the room: 99% of the binary packages in Trisquel comes from Ubuntu, which to a large extent are built from Debian source packages. Is it possible to rebuild the official binary packages identically?…

We are happy to announce the release of GNU Mes 0.27.