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It’s not long to FOSDEM 2024, where Guixers will come together to learn and hack.
As usual there’s some great talks and opportunities to meet other users and
contributors.
FOSDEM is Europe’s biggest Free Software conference.
It’s aimed at developers and anyone who’s interested in the Free Software
movement. While it’s an in-person conference there are live video streams
and lots of ways to participate remotely.
The schedule is varied with development rooms covering many interests. Here
are some of the talks that are of particular interest to Guixers:
Saturday, 3rd Febuary
- “Making reproducible and publishable large-scale HPC experiments“
by Philippe Swartvagher (10:30 CET). Phillipe will talk about the search for
reproducible experiments in high-performance computing (HPC) and how he uses
Guix in his methododology.
Sunday, 4th February
The Declarative and Minimalistic Computing track
takes place Sunday morning. Important topics are:
- Minimalism Matters: sustainable computing through smaller, resource efficient systems
- Declarative Programming: reliable and reproducible systems by minimising side-effects
Guix-related talks are:
- “Scheme in the Browser with Guile Hoot and WebAssembly“
by Robin Templeton (11:00 CET). A talk covering bringing Scheme to WebAssembly
through the Guile Hoot toolchain. Addressing the current state of Guile Hoot
with examples, and how recent Wasm proposals might improve the
situation in the future. - “RISC-V Bootstrapping in Guix and Live-Bootstrap“
by Ekaitz Zarraga (11:20 CET). An update on the RISC-V bootstrapping effort
in Guix and Live-bootstrap. Covering what’s been done, what’s left to do and
some of the lessons learned. - “Self-hosting and autonomy using guix-forge“
by Arun Isaac (11:40 CET). This talk demonstrates the value of Guix’s declarative
configuration to simplify deploying and maintaining complex services. Showing
guix-forge, a project that
makes it easy to self-host an efficient software forge. - “Spritely, Guile, Guix: a unified vision for user security“
by Christine Lemmer-Webber (12:00 CET). Spritely’s goal is to create
networked communities that puts people in control of their own identity
and security. This talk will present a unified vision of how Spritely,
Guile, and Guix can work together to bring user freedom and security to
everyone!
This year the track commemorates Joe Armstrong, who was the principal
inventor of Erlang. His focus on concurrency,
distribution and fault-tolerence are key topics in declarative and minimalistic
computing. This article
is a great introduction to his legacy. Along with
“The Mess We’re In“, a
classic where he discusses why software is getting worse with time, and what can
be done about it.
On Sunday afternoon, the Distributions devroom
has another Guix talk:
- “Supporting architecture psABIs with GNU Guix“
by Efraim Flashner (14:30 CET). Guix maintainer Efraim will be giving a
talk about improving Guix’s performance. Demonstrating how to use psABI
targets that keep older hardware compatible while providing optimized
libraries for newer hardware.
Guix Days (Thursday and Friday)
Guix Days will be taking place on the Thursday and Friday before FOSDEM. This is
an “unconference-style” event,
where the community gets together to focus on Guix’s development. All the
details are on the
Libreplanet Guix Wiki.
Participating
Come and join in the fun, whether you’re a new Guix user or seasoned hacker!
If you’re not in Brussels you can still take part:
- See the FOSDEM Schedule
- Watch the live streams
- Chat in the unofficial Guix Days Matrix room
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.
