GNU Guix: Meet Guix at FOSDEM

GNU Guix will be present at FOSDEM next
week, February 4th and 5th. This is the first time since the pandemic
that FOSDEM takes place again “in the flesh” in Brussels, which is
exciting to those of us lucky enough to get there! Everything will be
live-streamed and recorded thanks to the amazing FOSDEM crew, so
everyone can enjoy wherever they are; some of the talks this year will
be “remote” too: pre-recorded videos followed by live Q&A sessions with
the speaker.

Believe it or not, it’s the 9th year Guix is represented at
FOSDEM, with more than 30
talks given in past editions! This year brings several talks that will let you
learn more about different areas of the joyful Hydra Guix has become.

This all starts on Saturday, in particular with the amazing declarative
and minimalistic computing
track:

• “Bringing RISC-V to Guix's
  bootstrap”
  (remote), as a continuation of last year’s
  talk, will
  be Ekaitz Zarraga’s account of the successful port the full-source
  bootstrap to RISC-V—no less!
• In “Using GNU Guix Containers with FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy
  Standard)
  Support” (remote)
  John Kehayias will present the recently-added guix shell --container --emulate-fhs.
• “Declaring just what is
  necessary”
  (remote) will show how to create system images that contain just
  what you need, by Efraim Flashner.
• In “GNU Guix and Open Science, a
  crush?”,
  Simon Tournier will illustrates ways in which Guix can be beneficial
  to “open science”.
• “How Replicant, a 100% free software Android distribution, uses
  (or doesn't use)
  Guix” will
  showcase an unusual and exciting use case for Guix, by one of
  Replicant’s core developers, Denis “GNUtoo” Carikli.
• “An Introduction to Guix
  Home” will be
  given on Sunday (remote) by David Wilson of System
  Crafters fame—a must if you want to
  understand this newfangled Guix Home thing!

There are many other exciting talks in this
track,
some of which closely related to Guix and Guile; check it out!

You can also discover Guix in other tracks:

• On Saturday, “Guix, toward practical transparent, verifiable and
  long-term reproducible
  research”
  will be an introduction to Guix (by Simon Tournier) for an audience
  of scientists interested in coming up with scientific practices that
  improves verifiability and transparency.
• On Saturday in the security track, “Where does that code come
  from?”
  (by Ludovic Courtès) will talk Git checkout authentication in Guix
  and how this fits in the broader picture of “software supply chain”
  security.
• On Sunday, Efraim Flashner will talk about “Porting RISC-V to
  GNU Guix” in
  the RISC-V track.
• On Sunday, in the high-performance computing (HPC) track, Ludovic
  Courtès will give a lightning talk about CPU tuning in Guix entitled
  “Reproducibility and performance: why
  choose?”.

As was the case pre-pandemic, we are also organizing the Guix Days as a
FOSDEM fringe event, a two-day Guix
workshop where contributors and enthusiasts will meet. The workshop
takes place on Thursday Feb. 2nd and Friday Feb. 3rd at the
Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICAB) in
Brussels.

Again this year there will be few talks; instead, the event will
consist primarily of
“unconference-style”
sessions focused on specific hot topics about Guix, the Shepherd,
continuous integration, and related tools and workflows.

Attendance to the workshop is free and open to everyone, though you are
invited to register (there are few seats left!). Check out the
workshop’s wiki
page for
registration and practical info. Hope to see you in Brussels!

About GNU Guix

GNU Guix is a transactional package manager and
an advanced distribution of the GNU system that respects user
freedom.
Guix can be used on top of any system running the Hurd or the Linux
kernel, or it can be used as a standalone operating system distribution
for i686, x86_64, ARMv7, AArch64, and POWER9 machines.

In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports
transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management,
per-user profiles, and garbage collection. When used as a standalone
GNU/Linux distribution, Guix offers a declarative, stateless approach to
operating system configuration management. Guix is highly customizable
and hackable through Guile
programming interfaces and extensions to the
Scheme language.