FOSDEM talk about NixOS
Sander van der\
Burg gave a talk about NixOS at the CrossDistro\
track of FOSDEM
( video, [slides](https://web.archive.org/web/20160829182544/http://www.st.ewi.tude … ⌘ Read more
Route 53, wish I could have used you
Ever since Amazon announced it’s Route 53 service I have been dreaming on using it, but since I dislike to have services too spread out (got Google Apps and Linode now), I held up. Two days ago or so, Amazon announced new features tha … ⌘ Read more
ISSRE paper on NixOS-based system testing
The paper “Automating System\
Tests Using Declarative Virtual Machines” (by Sander van der
Burg and Eelco Dolstra) has been accepted for presentation at
the 21st IEEE International\
Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2010).
It describes how system tests with complex requirements on the
en … ⌘ Read more
Xfce in NixOS
NixOS now supports Xfce, a
modern, light-weight desktop environment. It can be enabled by
setting the NixOS configuration value
services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce.enable to
true. ( Screenshot) ⌘ Read more
Nix 0.16 released
Nix\
0.16 has been released, featuring a much faster evaluator
and support for configurable parallelism inside builders. See
the release\
notes for details. For installation information, see the manual. ⌘ Read more
NixOS talk at LSM
Ludovic Courtès gave a talk about Nix and NixOS at the Libre Software\
Meeting
in Bordeaux, entitled “NixOS:\
The Only Functional GNU/Linux Distribution” ( slides). ⌘ Read more
Nix 0.15 released
Nix\
0.15 has been released. This is a bug fix release. See the
release\
notes for details. For installation information, see the manual. ⌘ Read more
Nix 0.14 released
Nix\
0.14 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix
release. See the release\
notes for details. For installation information, see the manual. ⌘ Read more
Nix logo
The logo was originally created by Simon Frankau for the Haskell\ logo competition, who kindly gave us permission to use it
for the Nix project. (The snowflake motif is even more
appropriate for Nix, because nix is Latin for
snow.) Any further modifications are entirely our
fault. ⌘ Read more
Nix 0.13 released
Nix\
0.13 has been released. This is mostly a bug fix release,
although it also adds some new language features. See the release\
notes for details. For installation information, see the manual. ⌘ Read more
LWN.net article on NixOS
LWN.net has an article about NixOS
written by Koen Vervloesem. ⌘ Read more
Nixpkgs 0.12 released
Nixpkgs\
0.12 has been released. See the release\
notes for details. Meanwhile, the Nixpkgs trunk has been
updated
to GCC 4.3.3, Glibc 2.9 and X.org 7.4. ⌘ Read more
OpenOffice.org 3 in Nixpkgs
Lluís Batlle has updated OpenOffice.org in Nixpkgs to 3.0.1
( screenshot). ⌘ Read more
KDE 4.2 in Nixpkgs/NixOS
We now have a fairly complete set of KDE 4.2 packages in Nixpkgs
and NixOS. Previously we had KDE 3.5, but it was rather
incomplete: just kdelibs and kdebase.
Now we have all that desktop goodness, such as
kdemultimedia, kdenetwork and kdegames.
You can enable KDE 4 in NixOS by setting the
services.xserver.sessionType option to
kde4. Thanks go to Yury G. Kudryashov, And … ⌘ Read more
Hydra
Nix
and NixOS
releases are now built in Hydra, the new Nix-based
continuous build system. Hydra replaces our old Nix-based\
build farm, which will be phased out soon. There are
several advantages over the old build farm: the build tasks for
a project are scheduled and published separat … ⌘ Read more
Linux.com article about Nix
There is an article on Linux.com about Nix: “Nix fixes dependency\
hell on all Linux distributions”. ⌘ Read more
Nix 0.12 released
Nix\
0.12 has been released. The most important change is that
Nix no longer needs Berkeley DB to store metadata, but there are
many other improvements. See the release\
notes for details. ⌘ Read more
DisNix paper accepted at HotSWUp
The paper “Atomic Upgrading of Distributed Systems” (by Sander
van der Burg, Eelco Dolstra and Merijn de Jonge) has been
accepted for presentation at the First ACM Workshop on Hot\
Topics in Software Upgrades (HotSWUp). A draft\
of the paper is available. It describes Sander’s master’s
thesis research on DisNix, an extension … ⌘ Read more
NixOS paper accepted at ICFP!
The paper “NixOS: A Purely Functional Linux Distribution” (by
Eelco Dolstra and Andres Löh) has been accepted
for presentation at the 2008\
International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP).
It describes NixOS in much greater detail than last year’s
HotOS paper, an … ⌘ Read more
Website back up
The Nix website was down for a few days due to cooling
problems in the server room causing the machine to overheat.
These should be resolved now. Apologies for the
inconvenience. ⌘ Read more
Website / SVN repositories moved
The Nix website has moved to nixos.org (hosted at TU Delft). The Subversion
repositories have moved to svn.nixos.org. See
this\
mailing list posting for information about moving existing
SVN working copies. ⌘ Read more
LDTA 2008 paper
Eelco Dolstra presented the paper “Maximal\
Laziness — An Efficient Interpretation Technique for Purely\
Functional DSLs” at 8th\
Workshop on Language\
Description, Tools and Applications (LDTA 2008). It’s about
caching of evaluation results in the Nix expression evaluator as
a technique to make a simple term-rewriting evaluator efficient.
Slides are [here](h … ⌘ Read more
Jacquard grant proposal accepted!
The Jacquard\
program of
NWO and EZ has granted funding for the Nix-related project “Pull
Deployment of Services” (PDS), which is about improving the
deployment of software and services in complex heterogenous
environments. The grant consists of 368 K€ for a PhD student (4
years) and a postdoc (3 years). If you’re interested in these
positions, please h … ⌘ Read more
New NixOS ISOs
New NixOS installation CD images for i686 and
x86_64 are available,
which is a good thing as the previous ones were already a few
months old. The new images are Nix 0.11-based, contain Memtest86+ as a
convenience, should support more SATA drives, an … ⌘ Read more
Nix 0.11 released
Nix\
0.11 has been released. This is a major new release
representing over a year of development. The most important
improvement is secure multi-user support. It also features many
usability enhancements and language extensions, many of them
prompted by NixOS, the purely functional Linux distribution
based on Nix. See the [release\
notes](https://web.archive.org/web/20140913055323/https://releases.nixos.org … ⌘ Read more
SCO Receives Nasdaq Notice Letter
This doesn’t surprise me. What surprises me is that they are still on business.
SCO Receives Nasdaq Notice Letter — Yahoo! Finance
The SCO Group, Inc. (“SCO”) (Nasdaq: SCOX - News), a leading provider of UNIX™ software technology and mobile services, today announced that it received a Nasdaq Staff Determination letter on December 21, 2007 indicating that as a result of having filed for … ⌘ Read more
Nixpkgs 0.11 released
Nixpkgs\
0.11 has been released. See the release\
notes for details. ⌘ Read more
OpenOffice in Nixpkgs
Nixpkgs ( screenshot of\ OpenOffice 2.2.1 running under NixOS, and another\ screenshot). Despite being a rather gigantic package (it
takes two hours to compile on an In … ⌘ Read more
NixOS progress report
Finally we can run all those legacy\ applications… Thanks to Michael Raskin for adding Wine
and a NPTL-enabled Glibc (which Wine seems to need). This is a
nice application of purely functional package composition, by
the way: Wine didn’t work with the standard Glibc in Nixpkgs, … ⌘ Read more
Commits mailing list
There is now a mailing\
list (nix-commits@cs.uu.nl) that you can
subscribe to if you want to receive automatic commit
notifications from the Nix Subversion repository. ⌘ Read more
HotOS paper on NixOS
Eelco Dolstra presented the paper Purely\
Functional System\
Configuration Management at the 11th Workshop on\
Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS XI). It gives an
overview of the ideas behind NixOS. The
slides
are also available. ⌘ Read more
We now have KDE running on
NixOS ( obligatory\
screenshot). Just kdebase for now (Martin
Bravenboer already added kdelibs a long time ago so
that we could run the wonderful KCachegrind),
but it contains all the important stuff (Konqueror, KDesktop,
Kicker, Konsole, Control Center, … ⌘ Read more
Microsoft is a crying baby
What does Microsoft do when they don’t get it their way? They cry like babies, they snitch and they try to use their mu$cle to get things their way.
Microsoft Urges Review of Google-DoubleClick Deal – Microsoft, a veteran defendant of epic antitrust battles in the United States and Europe, is urging regulators to consider scuttling Google’s plan to buy DoubleClick, an online advertising company.
Microsoft contends that the $3.1 billion deal, announced on … ⌘ Read more
NixOS progress report
NixOS is now almost usable as a desktop OS ;-). We
have an X server, a bunch of Gnome packages, basic wireless
support, and of course all the applications in Nixpkgs that we
had all along running on other Linux distributions. Here are a
few screenshots:
- X server\
with Compiz window manager.
- [Emacs a … ⌘ Read more
NixOS manual
There is now some basic\
documentation for NixOS. ⌘ Read more
New build farm hardware at TUD
To quote
Eelco Visser: new
hardware for buildfarm at Delft University of Technology has
arrived.
Here’s what we have: 5 Intel Core 2 Duo DualCore machines
with 1GB RAM, 2 Mac minis with 1,83-GHz Intel Core
Duo-processor, another Core 2 Duo a UPS to deal with spikes in
power supp … ⌘ Read more
Nixpkgs 0.10 released
Nixpkgs\
0.10 has been released. See the release\
notes for details. ⌘ Read more
Nix 0.10.1 released
Nix\
0.10.1 has been released. It fixes two obscure bugs that
shouldn’t affect most users. ⌘ Read more
Nix 0.10 released
Nix\
0.10 has been released. This release has many
improvements and bug fixes; see the release\
notes for details. ⌘ Read more
Blue Security has gone down
Blue Security has announced it has ceased their anti-spam operations. From their website (which could be down as I type this):
As we cannot build the Blue Security business on the foundation we originally envisioned, we are discontinuing all of our anti-spam activities on your behalf and are exploring other, non spam-related avenues for our technological developments. As much as it saddens us, we … ⌘ Read more
Nixpkgs 0.9 released
Nixpkgs\
0.9 has been released. ⌘ Read more
PhD thesis defended
Eelco Dolstra
defended his PhD\
thesis on the purely functional deployment model. ⌘ Read more
Nix 0.9.2 released
Nix\
0.9.2 has been released released. This is a bug fix
release that addresses some problems on Mac OS X. ⌘ Read more
Nix 0.9 released
Nix 0.9
has been released. This is a new major release that provides
quite a few performance improvements and bug fixes, as well as a
number of new features. Read the release\
notes for details. ⌘ Read more
Secure sharing paper accepted for ASE 2005
The paper “Secure Sharing Between Untrusted Users in a
Transparent Source/Binary Deployment Model” has been accepted at
ASE 2005. This
paper describes how a Nix store can be securely shared by
multiple users who may not trust each other; i.e., how do we
prevent one user from installing a Trojan horse that is
subsequently executed by some other user? ⌘ Read more
Service deployment paper accepted for SCM-12
The paper “Service Configuration Management” (accepted at the
12th\
International Workshop on Software Configuration\
Management) describes how we can rather easily deploy
“services” (e.g., complete webserver configurations such as our
Subversion server) through
Nix by treating the non-component parts (such as configur … ⌘ Read more
Patching paper accepted for CBSE 2005
The paper “Efficient Upgrading in a Purely Functional Component
Deployment Model” has been accepted at CBSE 2005.
It describes how we can deploy updates to Nix packages
efficiently, even if “fundamental” packages like Glibc are
updated (which cause a rebuild of all dependent packages), by
deploying binary patches between components in the Nix store.
Includes tec … ⌘ Read more
**Paper “Imposing a Memory Management Discipline on Software
Deployment” accepted for presentation at ICSE 2004!**
The first Nix paper. ⌘ Read more