Blog / Announcements / 2007

New build farm hardware at TUD

- Published on Fri Feb 23 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 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… ...

NixOS for x86_64

- Published on Fri Feb 23 2007

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

NixOS manual

- Published on Mon Mar 19 2007

There is now some basic documentation for NixOS. ...

NixOS progress report

- Published on Thu Apr 05 2007

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. ...

NixOS progress report

- Published on Wed May 02 2007

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. ...

HotOS paper on NixOS

- Published on Fri Jun 08 2007

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. ...

Commits mailing list

- Published on Fri Sep 14 2007

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. ...

NixOS progress report

- Published on Sat Sep 22 2007

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 in Nixpkgs

- Published on Wed Oct 10 2007

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 released

- Published on Fri Oct 12 2007

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