News

DisNix paper accepted at HotSWUp 2008/9/9

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 to Nix that allows deployment and upgrading of distributed systems from a single declarative description. We will continue this research in the Jacquard PDS project, which has now started. (We still have an opening for a PhD student or a postdoc; please contact us if you’re interested.)

NixOS paper accepted at ICFP! 2008/6/16

ICFP logo 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, and argues why the purely functional style and features such as laziness are important for system configuration management. It also provides some measurements on the actual purity of Nix build actions. A draft of the paper is available.

Website back up 2008/5/6

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.

Website / SVN repositories moved 2008/4/25

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.

LDTA 2008 paper 2008/4/5

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.

Jacquard grant proposal accepted! 2008/2/14

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 have a look at this page, and don’t hesitate to contact Eelco Visser or Eelco Dolstra.

New NixOS ISOs 2008/1/6

NixOS installer online help 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, and show online help (the NixOS manual) on virtual console 7.

Nix 0.11 released 2007/12/31
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 for details.
Nixpkgs 0.11 released 2007/9/12
Nixpkgs 0.11 has been released. See the release notes for details.
OpenOffice in Nixpkgs 2007/9/10

OpenOffice screenshot OpenOffice is now in 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 Intel Core 2 6700), OpenOffice had only two “impurities” (references to paths outside of the Nix store) in its build process that had to be resolved — a reference to /bin/bash and one to /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.

Armijn Hemel, Wouter den Breejen and Eelco Dolstra contributed to the Nix expression for OpenOffice.

NixOS progress report 2007/8/22

NixOS screenshot Wine now runs on NixOS! 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, so we just pass it another Glibc at build time.

In other news, Nix 0.11 and Nixpkgs 0.11 will be released soon.

Commits mailing list 2007/8/14

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.

HotOS paper on NixOS 2007/5/8

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.

NixOS progress report 2007/4/2

KDE logo 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, etc.).

In related news, we can safely say that, rumours to the contrary notwithstanding, NixOS is not an April Fools’ Joke.

NixOS progress report 2007/3/5
NixOS screenshot 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:
NixOS manual 2007/2/19
There is now some basic documentation for NixOS.
NixOS for x86_64 2007/1/23
NixOS now works on x86_64 machines. A 64-bit ISO is available.
New build farm hardware at TUD 2007/1/23

New build farmTo 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 supply, a console with integrated monitor and keyboard switches, a rack with room for a couple more machines.

Here’s what we’re going to do with the goodies. The five Intel machines and the two MacMinis (also Intel) are going to be used to crank at building hundreds of software packages. Using virtualisation we should be able to run builds on multiple operating system distributions. Read more…

Nixpkgs 0.10 released 2006/10/12
Nixpkgs 0.10 has been released. See the release notes for details.
Nix 0.10.1 released 2006/10/11
Nix 0.10.1 has been released. It fixes two obscure bugs that shouldn’t affect most users.
Nix 0.10 released 2006/10/06
Nix 0.10 has been released. This release has many improvements and bug fixes; see the release notes for details.
Nixpkgs 0.9 released 2006/01/31
Nixpkgs 0.9 has been released.
PhD thesis defended 2006/01/18
Eelco Dolstra defended his PhD thesis on the purely functional deployment model.
Nix 0.9.2 released 2005/09/21
Nix 0.9.2 has been released released. This is a bug fix release that addresses some problems on Mac OS X.
Nix 0.9 released 2005/09/16
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.
Secure sharing paper accepted for ASE 2005 2005/07/28
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?
Service deployment paper accepted for SCM-12 2005/07/22
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 configuration files, control scripts and static data) as components that are built by Nix expressions. The result is that all advantages that Nix offers to software deployment also extend to service deployment, such as the ability to easily have multiple configuration side by side, to roll back configurations, and to identify the precise dependencies of a configuration.
Patching paper accepted for CBSE 2005 2005/02/17
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 techniques such as patch chaining and computing deltas between archive files.
Paper “Imposing a Memory Management Discipline on Software Deployment” accepted for presentation at ICSE 2004! 2003/12/16
The first Nix paper.

This page was last updated on 2006-03-07 at 15:40:02Z (revision 4992).