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 or unofficial/alternative channel for Guix, at least if one has more than one box (and possibly one physical location) to manage.
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 (“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>:
