Blog / Announcements / 2007

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 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…

NixOS now works on x86_64 machines. A 64-bit ISO is available.

There is now some basic documentation for NixOS.

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 and a few terminals showing off the (near) absence of /lib, /bin etc.; everything is in the Nix store. Some applications.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nixpkgs 0.11 has been released. See the release notes for details.