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hpr2198 :: How awesome is Guix and why will it take over the world

I sit down with Chris Webber and we ramble about how great Guix is

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Hosted by clacke on 2017-01-04 is flagged as Explicit and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
guix, linux, sysadmin, os, package management, nix, scheme, guile. 7.
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr2198

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Duration: 01:23:31

general.

I heard a "holy crap" somewhere in there, so I guess this show is explicit. That's about the level you can expect. :-)

I recorded this together with @cwebber@identi.ca over a year ago, on 2015-12-01. I told him I was hoping to get it out in time for FOSDEM. I didn't clarify which FOSDEM. :-D

So this thing has been lying around, and I've been polishing it and I've been thinking "man, 90 minutes is a bit rich for an HPR episode, I should edit this thing at some point". Procrastinator strikes again!

Well, that point never came in the course of one year, and HPR needs episodes, so this is what you get. I skipped around in it for QA reasons (audio sync) and I found that I wanted to listen to it again myself, so if your interests are anything like mine, I think it will be able to hold your attention. We had great fun recording it, and now that I've got it out of the gate, maybe I won't be ashamed to ask Chris to record another one about one of the many topics that came up during this show.

In the year since we recorded this, Guix has released versions 0.10.0, 0.11.0 and 0.12.0. It has functioning GNOME (based on Wingo's elogind) and can boot from a LUKS-encrypted drive.

DMD, the Daemon-Managing Daemon that was at the core of GuixSD, is now Shepherd, and still at the core of GuixSD.

Chris's project 8Sync is at version 0.2 and has a real GNU homepage (generated from S-expressions by Haunt!) and Guile 2.2 is closer than ever. 8Sync 0.2 uses some experimental features available in Guile 2.1 snapshots.

Guix and Software Conservancy still need your money (The FSF accepts Bitcoin!), and FOSDEM is still, or again, around the corner. I won't be going there this year, though, due to scheduling conflicts.

On my latest laptop I'm running NixOS and it's running just great. My Guix VM on the other machine is no longer running Enlightenment, now that GNOME is ready. :-)

I haven't fixed clusterssh in either Nix nor Guix, but tmux-cssh works pretty great too!

Someone should still write guix-bisect!

GuixOps has been dormant during 2016, but as late as two months ago there was some slight movement on the mailing list.

Links to various things and people mentioned in the show:


Comments

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Comment #1 posted on 2016-12-31 14:41:45 by clacke

Correction: 8Sync 0.3!

The show notes are already out of date. Apparently Chris released 8Sync 0.3 two weeks ago!

Comment #2 posted on 2017-01-04 06:43:07 by brian

please more

preferably, basic example of user package management... I installed and really liked it, but as a non-programmer, I was a little overwhelmed with system management.

Comment #3 posted on 2017-01-05 01:44:16 by Jonas

Interesting!

That's interesting to know there is a virtualenv type thing for an entire user login as well as a "distro". I'll definitely have a look. It would be great to hear how your cohost is getting along with using Guix in his current setup a year later.

Comment #4 posted on 2017-01-05 16:47:14 by clacke

Slides

This is not entirely helpful without narration (it's from a presentation I made), but maybe someone can glean some information from it:

https://clacke.neocities.org/slides/guix.html

Episode idea: Narrate this. I will do it in February.

Comment #5 posted on 2017-01-05 17:01:21 by clacke

Everyday package operations

The most common operations I do are:

guix environment --ad-hoc ncdu, where ncdu is something I heard about and want to try out, or something I only use once a month. It is then “installed” in the spawned sub-shell only. This is an awesome feature. (also, if you haven’t heard about ncdu, look it up) guix package -i ncdu if it turned out to be something I like and use every day guix package pull to get the latest definitions for this user guix package -u to upgrade my permanently installed stuff for this user guix package -d to erase history of what I had installed before and release thise references for collection guix gc to reclaim my precious disk space

Comment #6 posted on 2017-01-13 22:33:53 by BiasOpinion

Working Programmer

Like many programmers out there I am stuck in the narrow focus of my job. I found this episode informative and inspiring. Big Thumbs Up!

Comment #7 posted on 2017-02-25 12:28:55 by clacke

Video

I did record a presentation using those slides in February, so I guess I won't record a show. Video here:

https://www.lysator.liu.se/~clacke/video/2017-01-24_HK_Functional_Programming_guix_qscale_5.mp4

The latest Community News suggested though that my "Everyday package operations" comment deserved an episode, so I may record that.

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