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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has renewed its sponsorship for cache.nixos.org, the Nix public binary cache, enabling the operation of this foundational piece of infrastructure for another year. AWS's support started in 2023, when its Open Source Strategy and Marketing team, along with its Open Data team, stepped in when a previous sponsorship was discontinued. At this time, the growth of the Nix ecosystem was reaching an inflection point, outpacing the capacity to sustain it without additional…

tl;dr: There is a renewed effort to improve documentation, head to https://opencollective.com/nixos/projects/nix-documentation or contact foundation@nixos.org to chip in with funding! With the 2023 crowd-funding in documentation funding, we've seen some improvements, but a lot more is needed to make significant progress towards improving the overall experience with Nix documentation, including onboarding and discovery. Especially newcomers frequently struggle with our documentation, get…

Hey everyone, we are yayayayaka and jopejoe1, the release managers of the newest release of NixOS. We are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 26.05 "Yarara". NixOS is a Linux distribution. Its underlying package repository Nixpkgs can also be used on other Linux systems and macOS with the Nix package manager. This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2026-12-31). The old release 25.11 "Xantusia" is now officially…

Official Partnership between NixOS Foundation and Framework TL;DR: Since April 2025, The NixOS Foundation and Framework are officially partnering to improve NixOS support on Framework devices. This formalizes earlier community efforts, enabling selected community members to contribute to testing, documentation, and support for current and future hardware. We're excited to announce that the collaboration between the NixOS Foundation and Framework is evolving: what started as a community-led…

Hey everyone, we are jopejoe1 and Leona Maroni, the release managers of the newest release of NixOS. We are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 25.11 "Xantusia". NixOS is a Linux distribution. Its underlying package repository Nixpkgs can also be used on other Linux systems and macOS with the Nix package manager. This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2026-06-30). The old release 25.05 "Warbler" is now officially…

Hey everyone, we are Leona Maroni and Tristan Ross, the release managers of the newest release of NixOS. We are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 25.05 "Warbler". NixOS is a Linux distribution. Its underlying package repository Nixpkgs can also be used on other Linux systems and macOS with the Nix package manager. This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2025-12-31). The old release 24.11 "Vicuña" is now…

The NixOS logo was originally designed by Simon Frankau for Haskell as part of the 2009 Haskell logo contest. Simon kindly gave permission for the design to be used by the NixOS project, and it was made official in November 2009. In 2015, a new version of the logo with a "hexagon design" was created by Tim Cuthbertson and added to the homepage. In March of 2017, it officially superseded the previous logo and was added to the nixos-artwork repository. Over the years, there have been…

On March 4th, 2025, we welcomed a new NixOS Foundation Board — marking the first-ever board rotation under our newly established constitution. Change is always a big step, but we believe this one is for the better! With clearly defined roles and a more structured approach, the Foundation is set up for success in supporting the Nix & NixOS ecosystem. Following a thorough selection process, carefully coordinated with the Steering Committee, the new board members are: President/Chair: Ron…

Hello everyone, we are Tristan Ross and Weijia Wang, the release managers for the newest release of NixOS known as NixOS 24.11 Vicuña. We're glad to announce that after the additional week-long delay that we can deliver this stable release of NixOS. NixOS is a Linux distribution, whose set of packages can also be used on other Linux systems and macOS. This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2025-06-31). Release manual Highlights New Services Backward…

After successfully using CIVS to tally the 450 ballots cast (56% turnout) on OpaVote, We are hereby concluding this election! We congratulate the first members of the Nix Steering Committee (SC) (ordered alphabetically): @Ericson2314 (2 year term) @fpletz (1 year term) @Gabriella439 (2 year term) @jtojnar (2 year term) @roberth (2 year term) @tomberek (1 year term) @winterqt (1 year term) This result is certified by all Election Committee members. For verification purposes, all OpaVote ballots…

Some links in this post are only accessible to NixOS org members. As a first step towards a better governance for official Nix projects, we are happy to announce the kick-off of the first Nix Steering Committee election! The Steering Committee will be the primary community leadership body, responsible for steering the official Nix projects -- organisationally, socially, and technically. This includes making decisions over what is official, managing teams, approving NixOS Foundation policies…

Initially published by petites singularités. English translation provided by OW2. If you want to sign the letter, please re-publish the original letter on your website and add to the list of signatories. Since 2020, Next Generation Internet (NGI) programmes, part of European Commission's Horizon programme, fund free software in Europe using a cascade funding mechanism (see for example NLnet's calls). This year, according to the Horizon Europe working draft detailing funding programmes for 2025…

We're happy to announce that NixCon 2024, will take place October 25-27 2024 in Berlin For more information, see the NixCon 2024 website. And please consider submitting a talk! Follow the discussion on discourse: NixCon Announcement, CFP Announcement

Hey everyone, we are Weijia Wang and Jörg Thalheim, the release managers for this stable release and we are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 24.05 “Uakari”. NixOS is a Linux distribution, whose set of packages can also be used on other Linux systems and macOS. This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2024-12-31). Release manual Highlights New Services Backward Incompatibilities Other Notable Changes Upgrade Instructions ISO Image…

Hey everyone, we are figsoda and Ryan Lahfa, the release managers for this stable release and we are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 23.11 “Tapir”. This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2024-06-30). Release manual NixOS breaking changes New NixOS services Other notable NixOS changes Nixpkgs library breaking changes Nixpkgs library additions and improvements Nixpkgs library deprecations Upgrade Instructions ISO Image Downloads…

Hey everyone, we are Ryan Lahfa and Martin Weinelt, the release managers for this stable release and we are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 23.05 “Stoat”. This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2023-12-31). Release manual Highlights New Services Backward Incompatibilities Other Notable Changes Nixpkgs internals Detailed migration information Upgrade Instructions ISO Image Downloads The 23.05 release was made possible due to the…

This is the first in a new series of posts called "Tales from Nixpkgs" where we examine Nixpkgs commits to understand how this ecosystem works and provide a bit of visibility into the process. This also gives us a chance to show appreciation for the maintainers and perhaps also uncover interesting stories along the way. Let's take a look at a randomly picked commit from the last year of Nixpkgs: git log --pretty=oneline --since 1y | shuf | head -n1 | cut -f1 -d' ' | xargs git show…

Hey everyone, we are Martin Weinelt and Janne Heß, the release managers for this stable release and we are very proud to announce the public availability of NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”. This release will receive bugfixes and security updates for seven months (up until 2023-06-30). Release manual Highlights Internal changes Notable version Updates Backward Incompatibilities Other Notable Changes New Services Upgrade Instructions ISO Image Downloads The 22.11 release was made possible due to the efforts…

72 hours out. A bead of sweat slides from your brow, falls to the marred chassis of your local build server, and sizzles into mist, leaving a scant salt stain to tell the tale. It’s the start of the hottest Summer of Nix on record, and you have three days to research, provision, configure, and deploy. With or without you, this lecture is going live. The deadline was 19 July, 2022; at five o’clock on that glistening Tuesday afternoon, one Eelco Dolstra – a living legend to those who understand –…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, video conferencing turned out to be an invaluable tool for online collaboration. While many used proprietary tools for this, there is one proven free and open source video conferencing tool that also gained much traction and stayed popular: Jitsi Meet Primarily known for its publicly available service meet.jit.si, it is also possible to self-host Jitsi Meet on your own server. There are a variety of reasons why you may consider hosting Jitsi Meet yourself instead of…

Hey everyone, I'm Janne Heß, the release manager for 22.05. As promised, the latest stable release is here: NixOS 22.05 “Quokka”. Release manual Highlights New Services Backward Incompatibilities Other Notable Changes Upgrade Instructions Image downloads The 22.05 release was possible due to the efforts of 1611 contributors in 46727 commits. We would especially like to thank our top 10 contributors: Fabian Affolter, Sandro Jäckel, Martin Weinelt, Bobby Rong, Mario Rodas, Jonathan Ringer, Jan…

We're pleased to announce the availability of Nix 2.8.0. It will be available from NixOS - Getting Nix / NixOS. Here are the release notes: New experimental command: nix fmt, which applies a formatter defined by the formatter.<system> flake output to the Nix expressions in a flake. Various Nix commands can now read expressions from standard input using --file -. New experimental builtin function builtins.fetchClosure that copies a closure from a binary cache at evaluation time and rewrites…

Summer of Nix 2022 will happen from July 18th to September 30th! Applications are open here from now until May 15th!. Following the excitement of Summer of Nix 2021 (more in last year’s report, I am happy to announce that the European Commission, NLNet and the NixOS Foundation have granted enough budget to organize another community event this year. After some brainstorming sessions I am excited to share how we (an organization committee of ~8 people now) would like to organize this event…

We're pleased to announce the availability of Nix 2.7.0. It will be available from NixOS - Getting Nix / NixOS. Here are the release notes: Nix will now make some helpful suggestions when you mistype something on the command line. For instance, if you type nix build nixpkgs#thunderbrd, it will suggest thunderbird. A number of “default” flake output attributes have been renamed. These are: defaultPackage.<system> → packages.<system>.default defaultApps.<system> →…

The NixOS Marketing Team is pleased to announce the first official NixOS Community Survey. Please take 5-10 minutes to complete it. Since the Nix community has been growing faster and larger every month, it's gotten harder to understand who makes up the community and what everyone cares about. So we're conducting this survey to improve our understanding of those questions. We hope to use your responses to develop Nix, NixOS, and Nixpkgs to match your needs and come up with new ideas for growing…

Happy to announce that the Summer of Nix 2021 report is out. This report explains in detail the motivation behind Summer of Nix, and how it was organized in 2022. If you have comments or questions, don't hesitate to reach out to summer@nixos.org.

We're pleased to announce the availability of Nix 2.6.0. Instructions how to install Nix on different platforms can be found on the download page. Here are the release notes: New builtin function builtins.zipAttrsWith with the same functionality as lib.zipAttrsWith from Nixpkgs, but much more efficient. The Nix CLI now searches for a flake.nix up until the root of the current Git repository or a filesystem boundary rather than just in the current directory. The TOML parser used by…

Hey everyone, we're Timothy DeHerrera and Tom Bereknyei, the release managers for 21.11. As promised, the latest stable release is here: NixOS 21.11 “Porcupine”. Release manual Highlights New Services Backward Incompatibilities Other Notable Changes Upgrade Instructions Image downloads The 21.11 release was possible due to the efforts of 1541 contributors in 41960 commits. We would especially like to thank our top 10 contributors: Sandro Jäckel, Fabian Affolter, Martin Weinelt, figsoda…

This is a record of my time in the Summer of Nix holding my breath and diving into the depths of Nix to gain some Perls of wisdom. Going through the issues assigned to my team I came across the the package for OpenFoodFacts a collaborative database that collects and provides open data on 1 million food products from around the world and counting! Not knowing what we are eating seems like a strange thing. But really, how much do we know what goes into those vacuum packed bags that we open and…

Makes A DevSecOps framework powered by Nix and the NixOS module system. Our goal is to help people setup a powerful CI/CD system in just a few steps, in any provider, while lowering the barrier to entry for the community. Mobile NixOS: July 2021 round-up Nix 🖤 macOS: June/July 2021 update The Ongoing effort at bumping LLVM and macOS SDK. terraform-provider-hydra A Terraform provider for declaratively managing Hydra projects and jobsets, Determinate Systems' first open source release. Modded…

Rumor was already out but now we announce it officially: we are organizing a big hiring event on October 27th where Summer of Nix participants and applicants can meet companies that use it. Participation is free but places are limited for organizational reasons to Summer of Nix participants and applicants for now. If you like to know more, send us a mail at summer@nixos.org.

NixOS 21.05 released! Jonathan Ringer, release manager, announces NixOS 21.05 release with 1745 contributors in 33474 commits. How we went from supporting 50 languages to all of them Replit replaces Docker with Nix and drastically improves support for languages. Peter Simons has retired from Haskell maintenance in Nixpkgs Please thank him for all his hard work! The Changelog #437 Domen Kožar introduces the Nix ecosystem. Compositional podcast Nix in Production with Domen Kožar NixNG, a late…

Thanks a lot for your interest in the Summer of Nix program! We've done more than a hundred interviews in two months, it's been thrilling to see so much excitement over this program. We are currently in the process of selecting participants and making the teams: stay tuned!

Hey everyone, I'm Jonathan Ringer, the release manager for 21.05. As promised, the latest stable release is here: NixOS 21.05 “Okapi”. Release manual Highlights New Services Backward Incompatibilities Other Notable Changes Upgrade Instructions Image downloads The 21.05 release was possible due to the efforts of 1745 contributors in 33474 commits. We would especially like to thank our top 10 contributors: Fabian Affolter, Frederik Rietdijk, Sandro Jäckel, Tim Steinbach, Jonathan Ringer, Martin…

RFC 0085 FCP NixOS Release Stabilization: ZHF on master, new timeline RFC 0085 has been accepted! Nix Portable Nix - Static, Permissionless, Install-free, Pre-configured The Summer of Nix A two month train and work program from August 2nd to October 15th 2021 - great for anyone who wants to rapidly increase their Nix skills while doing useful work. Nix 🖤 macOS Monthly Update Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit nix-script: nix-shell shebangs for speed and flexibility Building container images…

Introducing flox - Nix for simplicity and scale flox makes it easy to build software or manage development environments with Nix at any scale. Trustix Distributed trust and reproducibility tracking for binary caches. Recurring funding for making macOS a first-class citizen in Nix ecosystem A call for companies/developers to contribute financially towards addressing major macOS issues in the ecosystem. Offloading NixOS builds to a faster machine Build your NixOS Raspberry Pi Image using Github…

RFC 0080 Change NixOS releases to YY.05,YY.11 accepted The next NixOS stable release will be 21.05. agenix - manage NixOS secrets - public beta Agenix is a command-line tool for managing secrets encrypted with your existing SSH keys. It includes a NixOS module, age, for adding encrypted secrets into the Nix store and decrypting them. Cachix: Postmortem of outage on 20th December Deploying with GitHub Actions and more Nix Scrive Nix Workshop specialized for Haskell developers Installing NixOS on…

deadnix Finds and removes unused code in .nix files. Nix 💙 Deployments fund call for contributors A fund on OpenCollective for the maintenance and development of Nix-based deployment technologies, starting with funding the NixOps 2 release. NixOS is available on GandiCloud VPS A NixOS server can be started in a single command or by few clicks on GandiCloud VPS. This work would not be possible without the many contributions of the community. You can help too! Create or comment on the pull…

Announcing Nixpkgs Database A database and search engine for the entire history of each package at Nixpkgs. Cachix: write access control for binary caches The trust of who created binary cache contents comes from who owns the private signing key. This approach has a number of disadvantages when it comes to lifecycle in teams, so API tokens are now the default way to manage write access. NixOS 21.03 Call for Release Manager nixpkgs: Python 2.7 packages are no longer built nixpkgs: Haskell…

Hey everyone, I'm Jonathan Ringer, one of the release managers for 20.09. As promised, the latest stable release is here: NixOS 20.09 “Nightingale” ✨. Release manual Highlights New Services Backward Incompatibilities Other Notable Changes Upgrade Instructions Image downloads The 20.09 release was possible due to the efforts of 1313 contributors in 31282 commits. We would especially like to thank our top 10 contributors: Mario Rodas, Frederik Rietdijk, Jörg Thalheim, Maximilian Bosch, Jonathan…

NixCon 2020 Call-for-Participation is open! Conference dates: Oct. 16th – 18th, 2020. Live streaming on 2020.nixcon.org 20.09 Zero Hydra Failures has begun! Help stabilize NixOS for the upcoming 20.09 Release Cachix: Changes to Garbage Collection Based on your feedback there are two minor changes to how garbage collection behaves in Cachix. nixbuild.net is Generally Available Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1 fromElisp An Emacs Lisp reader in Nix. dconf2nix Nixify your DConf files (Gnome3 configuration)…

NixOS | Installation and First Impressions Why IHP is Using The Nix Package Manager Cachix Blog: Documentation and More Documentation Cachix Blog: Upstream caches: avoiding pushing paths in cache.nixos.org Redox added to Nixpkgs Nixpkgs now supports cross-compiling to the Redox operating system. The redoxpkgs overlay has been created to fix packages for Redox An introduction to nix-shell What is nix-shell and how to use it. Windows Functional Virtual Machine WFVM automatically bootstraps a…

Nix error messages proposal: phase 2, PR 1 merged! Nearly every C++ file in the repo was touched! This will be the biggest PR, by far, for this project. Getting this in is a major feat! Next up, I'm looking forward to finishing out this phase with showing the lines of code for errors, and supporting show-trace in the new format. I expect that PR to be much easier, both to make the changes and to review them. Long-term reproducibility with Nix and Software Heritage RFC 70: Merge nixos-hardware…

Nix 2.3.5 release Long awaited support for macOS Catalina, see the manual A bunch of options to invoke installer (pass --help to see what's there) Various bugfixes to the installer MacOS sandboxing improvements Nix for GitHub Actions v9 v9 saves you a bunch of time when bootstrapping Nix (you can even disable adding of channels) Linux: ~20s -> ~7s MacOS: ~90s -> ~20s Nix Flakes, Part 1: An introduction and tutorial This is the first in a series of blog posts intended to provide a gentle…

NixOS 20.03 was released NixOS 20.03 “Markhor” had 1014 people contribute 21597 contributions. Announcing Nixiosk Declarative Kiosk systems built with NixOS. Announcing Marketing Team The marketing team was founded and had their few meetings. They already improved the website (see Learn page). If you want to join, you will find the details in the announcement post. Let's improve the presentation of Nix/NixOS! nix-update A tool for updating nix packages semi-automatically The journey of packaging…

Hey everyone, I am worldofpeace, one of the release managers for 20.03. As promised, the most glittered stable release is here: NixOS 20.03 “Markhor” ✨. Release notes Upgrade instructions Image downloads We had 1014 people contribute to NixOS 20.03 and 21597 contributions. Thank you soo much, each contribution is valued. Top 10 ordered by commits Rank Name Commits 1 Frederik Rietdijk 1573 2 worldofpeace 1273 3 Mario Rodas 1256 4 Maximilian Bosch 720 5 Jan Tojnar 491 6 Jonathan Ringer 477 7 Jörg…

Introducing nixbuild.net nixbuild.net is nix build as a service, allowing you to easily run distributed builds without having to setup, scale and maintain build servers. Proposal for improving Nix error messages Crowdfunding campaign to fund a complete rework of error messages in Nix to improve beginner's experience and make working with the tooling pleasant. Contextflow is hiring! contextflow is an award winning Vienna-based startup using AI on 3D medical images to improve radiology workflows…

nix-simple-deploy A Rust rewrite of unmaintained nix-deploy. Any feedback appreciated! cached-nix-shell: Instant startup time for nix-shell Caching layer for nix-shell featuring instant startup time on subsequent runs. It supports NixOS and Linux. structured-attrs An explanation of __structuredAttrs in stdenv and why enabling it would be desirable. nix-bisect: Bisect Nix Builds A small command-line tool and python library that makes bisecting nix builds much more convenient. It prevents common…

Nix Notes The Nix Notes is a collection of short notes about Nix, each contributing to the same virtual machine image. The notes show how to deploy the image to Digital Ocean, update the running virtual machine without recreating it, and more. Deploying a fully automated Nix-based static website NYLUG Presents: "Sneaking in Nix - Building Production Containers with Nix" by Graham Christensen Lead DevOps Engineer with NixOs, Rust and Cloudflare A Nix-based functional organization for…

Launching Hercules CI Announcing general availability of continuous integration specialized for Nix projects. Hercules CI Agent 0.6.1 Performance improvements, a bugfix to IFD and better onboarding experience. Improved performance in Nixpkgs Improving Nixpkgs setup by avoiding subshells in processing dependencies. Recently rewritten Nix-on-Droid got accepted into F-Droid repository Trying out Nix on your aarch64 or i686 Android device is now easier than ever. Two big stdenv cleanups: Enable…

NixOS 19.09 released ociTools in NixOS Katharina explains her recently merged Open Container Initiative support in NixOS. Industrial-strength Deployments in Three Commands Vaibhav demonstrates how NixOps works by implementing a small deploy script from scratch. nix-emacs-ci Emacs installations for continuous integration Setting up a Custom Nix Channel How to put your /nix directory on a separate device Strange Loop 2019: "Functional DevOps in a Dysfunctional World" by Vaibhav Sagar…

NixOS 19.09 “Loris” has been released, the twelfth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 19.09 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 19.09, check out the manual section on upgrading.

One-page Nix expression language overview Vincent wrote a one-page introduction to Nix language, covering language features you'll most likely encounter from day one. Encrypted ZFS mirror with mirrored boot on NixOS Using the boot.loader.grub.mirroredBoots module to have redundant boots with an encrypted ZFS mirror. Serokell is hiring Nix DevOps Engineers Serokell is looking for remote full-time Nix SREs. Yants - Yet Another Nix Type System Yants is a small runtime type-checker for Nix that can…

nix is now easier to bootstrap on Linux distributions without previous nix installation. Non-NixOS users are encouraged to try and report whether the improved autoconf checks make it easier to build it from source. static-haskell-nix started a crowd-funding on OpenCollective during ZuriHac to get its own dedicated Hetzner build server. Amazingly, the funding goal was reached within only 4 days! A big rework of the gstreamer package landed in nixpkgs with the upgrade to 1.16. It also demonstrates…

A set of patches to build Redox on NixOS An attempt to embrace Nix instead of constantly working around the limitations to build Redox OS. The ultra optimistic long-term goal is to be a competing alternative to the GNU make build system the project currently uses, to make Redox builds reproducible and reliable. An experiment: ad-hoc container images made by @tazjin Using NixOS as an stateless workstation EuAndreh goes through the journey of installing NixOS on their laptop. nix-mode.el 1.4.1…

autobake: Create build recipes through automated trial and error GNU Guix 1.0.0 released RFC on setup.nix Python development tool Asko proposes a new Python development tool SNM release compatible with NixOS 19.03 nixpkgs macOS stdenv updates Matthew's overview of recent stdenv updates, which also bumps minimal supported version to 10.12. Phoronix: NixOS Takes Action After 1.2GB/s ZFS Encryption Speed Drops To 200MB/s With Linux 5.0+ nixfmt Serokell releases nixfmt 0.1 with a focus on speed and…

Setting up a C++ project environment with Nix Jacek explans step by step how to package a simple C++ project and how to build against a matrix of different dependencies. Anduril Industries is Hiring Nix Engineers Please see this post or email travis@anduril.com for more information. Software Heritage and GNU Guix join forces to enable long term reproducibility NixCon Brno 2019 is looking for sponsorship NixCon is happening again, if your company is using Nix in production, consider sponsoring…

The IPFS team made package managers their top priority for 2019 There might be progress on its Nix integration. Statically linked Haskell executables and optionally Docker images or Debian packages Alexandre shows us how to use Niklas' package set to compile Haskell packages statically using musl. Concourse CI on NixOS Michael walks us through the process of setting up Concourse CI on a NixOS machine. NixOS 19.03 Koi released Linus announces latest NixOS release, a total of over 20,000 commits…

NixOS 19.03 “Koi” has been released, the eleventh stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 19.03 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 19.03, check out the manual section on upgrading.

NIXML: nix + YAML for easy reproducible environments Announcing the new Golang infrastructure: buildGoModule Why I use NixOS Announcing tree-sitter-nix A simple formatter for Nix using tree-sitter-nix Announcing Mixnix - Build Elixir projects with Nix Target and Tweag announce lorri, a nix-shell replacement for project development lorri is based around fast direnv integration for robust CLI and editor integration. Try it out PatchELF 0.10 released This work would not be possible without the many…

Announcing Cachix private binary caches and 0.2.0 release You can now share an unlimited number of binary caches in your group of developers, protected from public use with just a few clicks. Nix in Termux Alexander Sosedkin makes Nix on Android working on AARCH64. Inclusion upstream can be followed in the termux repo Artwork for the upcoming NixOS 19.03 Koi release Updated merchant report for the release Why you should never ever use NixOS Rant from someone who got his hands to maintain NixOS…

Moving from Homebrew to Nix Package Manager Salar wrote a step-by-step tutorial how to migrate from homebrew to Nix. nixos/printers: declarative configuration Tired of manually configuring your CUPS printers every time you set up a new NixOS host? Please take a look and give it a try to see whether everything works with your setup! Static Nix: a command-line swiss army knife Matthew shows how using statically linked Nix in a 5MB binary, one can use Nix without root. With an one-liner shell, you…

NixOS is bootable via netboot.xyz Try out NixOS, without having to even create a USB key. Easy dependency management for Nix projects Easily pin, update, and maintain remote dependencies for each of your Nix projects. The Pantheon desktop environment has been added to NixOS (on master) It can be enabled with services.xserver.desktopManager.pantheon.enable. The case of the supersized shebang Regression in the linux kernel all together with backporting the issue into all stable kernels. Diving…

Nix is now available in Debian NixOS 19.03 feature freeze nixos-generators The nixos-generators project allows to take the same NixOS configuration, and generate outputs for different target formats i.e. ISO, kexec tarballs, qemu's qcow2 format, google cloud images... Code archeology: 15 years ago Nix files had .fix extension. Compare original MPlayer expression, it's first rewrite and modern view hydra-in-a-bag by @samueldr aims to provide a one-click command solution to running a hydra…

nix-instantiate introduction A polite introduction to use nix-instantiate and the NixOS module system to render JSON. TerraNix Terraform is awesome, it would be much more awesome with a NixOS module system. Debian is packaging Nix elm2nix 0.1 nix-env replacement for imperative package management, but with declarative core nix-mode.el's alternate indentation function nix-indent-line has received some very needed indentation improvements in NixOS/nix-mode#61, and automated tests and Travis-CI…

Gnome 3.30 with wayland support has hit master To launch a wayland session simply use GDM or SDDM and select the gnome session. Select gnome-xorg to run an X11 session. If you encounter a bug please cc @hedning on github. Fast Docker Compose 'deployments' for development with Arion A little tool we use at Hercules CI for process supervision of local developer environments. No need to export, load or garbage collect Docker images! RFC0036 (Improving the RFC process) entered its Final Comments…

NixOS 19.03 will leverage multiple cores automatically by default for builds and Nix 2.2 will have the sandbox enabled by default on Linux Deploy a C++ web app on Heroku using Docker and Nix Meson 0.48 landed in staging again Declarative client mail configuration In the past few months, some work went into home-manager to abstract mail configuration and generate configs for a variety of client-side software. Declare your username/password once and generate configs for…

NixCon 2018 videos of talks Eris: A simple binary cache server News on the security team Language Server Protocol for Nix using HNix NixOS mailserver 2.2.0 The NixOps resources.machines option Auto patching prebuilt binary software Engineer at Mercury Mercury is hiring a generalist engineer in SF. Mercury uses Nix for development, Hydra for CI, and runs on NixOS on AWS. Deployment Working Group nixdoc to generate documentation for Nix library functions NixOS/nixpkgs#49275 for the first generated…

cache.nixos.org moved from Amazon to Fastly. A very hacky proof of concept of a lisp in Nix NixOS 18.09 Jellyfish released Request for maintenance: Azure blobs Your First Hydra This work would not be possible without the many contributions of the community. You can help too! Create or comment on the pull request for the next edition or look at the issue tracker to add other improvements.

NixOS 18.09 “Jellyfish” has been released, the tenth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 18.09 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 18.09, check out the manual section on upgrading.

We are happy to announce that we have moved our binary cache to Fastly. Fastly is a big supporter of open source projects and now NixOS is one of them! Fastly provides us with CDN capability, which previously was running on AWS CloudFront. Big thanks go to Fastly, in particular Tom Denniston and Elaine Greenberg, our friends at Infor and Packet.com and Graham Christensen for making this possible.

Exploring Nix & Haskell Part 1: Project Setup This is the first of a series of posts, with the overarching goal of building up a deterministic Haskell development environment using Nix, including a modern IDE experience and any tooling built-in. New Aarch64 (and armv7l-linux omg!) builders New shirt and logo for 18.09 release krops as an alternative to NixOps NixOps, the official DevOps tool of NixOS, is nice but it has some flaws. krops is an alternative to NixOps trying to solve some of…

The NixCon 2018 sold out and program is now live Help make the Nix ecosystem's docs better A lot of people meet DocBook for the first time when they're contributing to the documentation of older, well established open source projects like NixOS. Now there is https://docbook.rocks/ to help you get past the initial hurdle of "what do I do now?" I hope this helps! Nix 2.1 has been added to the docker images Creating Nix build function abstractions for pluggable SDKs Packaging a Haskell…

Nix overlay to program and use a tomu U2F token #33686: New installer bootloader Updates the bootloader, shedding one of the few remaining old logos, while also adding new features. Mainly, HiDPI options under a new sub-menu, allowing modesetting the console to a readable size! RFC 32: Tweak the process of executing phases in the stdenv for better nix-shell UX A proposal for making it easier to manually run phases of a build inside a nix-shell. Real-time audio in NixOS Bootstrap a zfs-on-root…

Nix 2.1 has been released. See the release notes for a list of changes and new features.

NixOS in production Gabriel Gonzalez shows how to do a remote [nixos-rebuild switch]{.title-ref} while pinning nixpkgs The [nix-devel]{.title-ref} mailing list is now replaced by our discourse.nixos.org forum instance which is also usable by email This work would not be possible without the many contributions of the community. You can help too! Create or comment on the pull request for the next edition or look at the issue tracker to add other improvements.

An EPYC NixOS build farm Graham explores and benchmarks an AMD EPYC build server against a differently incredible build server, finding the EPYC's builds are much faster across the board. Understanding Nix's String Context Shea Levy explains what is String Context, how it's implemented in Nix and shares implications on the use of the language. PostgreSQL packaging is getting an overhaul Easier use of plugins, version 10 as default, improved documentation, LLVM JIT support and more. RFC…

The nix-devel mailing list is now replaced by our discourse forum instance which is also usable by email: discourse.nixos.org.

NixOS 18.09 JellyFish to be forked off in a month Whole Nix community would like to specifically call out a massive thank-you to vcunat and samueldr for being 18.09's release managers, an important and central role in each release. Thank you Vladimír and Samuel! Snack incremental builds for Haskell is requesting feedback Beginner's guide to cross compilation in Nixpkgs nix-du: Visualise which gc-roots to delete to free some space in your nix store nix-top: Tool which allows high-level monitoring…

NixOS weekly project is rebooting, expect a newsletter every Wednesday in the morning (European timezone). You're more than welcome to submit new items with a short description on latest pull request Domen Patreon to support the NixOS OfBorg infrastructure This supports Graham's infrastructure costs for the OfBorg tooling. Introducing the Nix Core Team NixCon2018 call for proposals cache.nixos.org now more local Announcing Cachix - Binary Cache as a Service Painlessly developing Python on NixOS…

We're happy to announce that NixCon 2018, the third Nix Conference, will take place October 25-27 2018 in London For more information, see the NixCon 2018 website. And please consider submitting a talk!

NixOS 18.03 “Impala” has been released, the ninth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 18.03 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 18.03, check out the manual section on upgrading.

Welcome to another edition of NixOS "Weekly" Newsletter! Thank you to everyone who helped make this happen. Nix 2.0 has been released discussion on lobste.rs discussion on hacker news NixOS 18.03 release approaching Mog has set up an unofficial redbubble store for various NixOS items (T-shirts, stickers, banners). Nix has learned to load plugins Nix workgroups area Workgroups are used to facilitate working on components of the Nix ecosystems. As of this writing there exists: container…

Nix 2.0 has been released. See the release notes for a list of changes and new features.

Welcome to another edition of NixOS "Weekly" News -- we're still working on that weekly bit and I've half a mind to amend the quote to add "monthly before weekly". Let me start by addressing everyone who helped put this edition together: By creating the content and helping collect items, you make the newsletter possible. Thank you. Contributions for future editions are more than welcome. One way to help is by editing a release; we've added an Editor's Guide to help you. There…

The phoenix is a long-lived fiery bird that is present in many different mythologies from around the world. When a phoenix "dies", it does so by combustion and is reborn of the ashes left behind. It rises from its own ashes, in the freshness of youth, to live through another cycle of years. So in a sense, it never truly dies, but regenerates itself and lives forever. Just like this weekly newsletter. Welcome to the 2018 NixOS "Weekly" newsletter. We are back and hope to…

NixOS 17.09 “Hummingbird” has been released, the eighth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 17.09 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 17.09, check out the manual section on upgrading.

The nix-dev mailing list has moved to nix-devel on Google Groups.

We're happy to announce that NixCon 2017, the second Nix Conference, will take place October 28–31 2017 in Munich For more information, see the NixCon 2017 website. And please consider submitting a talk!

Welcome to another edition of NixOS Weekly. Major announcements include NixCon 2017 and the old wiki migration. This edition adds a new Tooling section for possibly useful Nix-related tools in addition to News, Jobs, Reading, and Events. NixCon 2017 October 28-31, Munich. Call for participation is open until July 31. The Wiki is dead. Long live the Wikis! This is the change that disable the wiki. The old wiki has been for a while now with ongoing work on updating and migrating the content…

A few months ago a proposal to define improvements process (nixos/rfcs) was announced. While many contributions to Nix and NixOS related projects fits into GitHub pull requests model, doing a substantial change requires more involvement from the community. Two months later we can see that NixOS community is picking up on the process and RFCs are starting to show up each week. First RFC to go through the process. What a milestone! RFC 0004: Replace Unicode Quotes was voted to be implemented. And…

Or in other words: no more Perl in Nix! Shea Levy's last branch for his long-ongoing work to remove Perl from the Nix tool has finally been merged NixOS on Packet.net Over the past several months, Graham Christensen (grahamc), Tuomas Tynkkynen (dezgeg), and many wonderful people from Packet.net have collaborated on bringing NixOS to Packet.net. Our collaboratioon started in January with Packet sponsoring many Hydra build servers. It continued by bringing ARMv8 builders to hydra.nixos.org. It is…

The 17.03 "Gorilla" release has been tagged! There are too many good things in this release to pick favourites. I refer you to the release notes instead. Some fun stats: ~ 900 new packages since 16.09 ~ 80 new contributors (very inexact science this) ~ 60 new services Did I mention the release? Robin has been doing a fantastic job, thank him when you meet him! He's also had a lot of help of course, so thanks to all those people as well. It's a pretty long list and you can get it with…

NixOS 17.03 “Gorilla” has been released, the seventh stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 17.03 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 17.03, check out the manual section on upgrading.

Nix, NixOS and nixpkgs are all moving ahead at good speed. The 17.03 milestone is more than 50% complete, and we merged 144 pull requests for nixpkgs just in the last seven days. The NixOS 17.03 beta has been announced. We now allow packages to be marked insecure, and you have to opt-in to install insecure packages similarly to how you opt in to non-free software. The option is called permittedInsecurePackages. See the updated docs for more. Robin finished the systemd 232 update which opens up…

Another two weeks have passed and it is time for our summary. A new section Questions was added to the newsletter. The intention for this new section is that it is going to expose some of the questions that happen in the past. We hope that none of the questions will be left unanswered. Sometimes we forget just how awesome Nix / NixOS is and we take its capabilities for granted. It is important that we remind ourself from time to time why are we using it, via reddit - In Love: Just thought I'd…

Let us together review what happened in NixOS community in last 2 weeks. We are always looking to improve. Let us know how we can do better. Many of you are not aware, but you can easily subscribe and help triage tickets and pull requests in NixOS/nixpkgs repository. Branch-Off and Release Timeline for NixOS 17.03. Hydra Building PRs discussion with a follow-up discussion. The service is merging with hydra.nixos.org. Nixpkgs Overlays pull request proposed by Nicolas B. Pierron got merged (more…

Welcome to the first edition of NixOS weekly. We will do our best to release this newsletter every second week. If there is something you think we could improve, please let us know. NixOS 17.03 release manager is Robin Gloster. Thank you and we are looking to help you get 17.03 out of the door. Typing nix − funding campaign: Help Théophane Hufschmitt get his internship funded. Jan 24, 2017, London NixOS User Group at CodeNode, London, UK Feb 25, 2017, Amsterdam Nix Meetup at Container Solutions…

NixOS 16.09 “Flounder” has been released, the sixth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 16.09 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 16.09, check out the manual section on upgrading.

NixOps 1.4 has been released. This release contains contains many nice new features. See the manual for details.

NixOS 16.03 “Emu” has been released, the fifth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 16.03 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 16.03, check out the manual section on upgrading.

Nix 1.11 has been released. See the release notes for a list of changes and new features.

NixOS 15.09 “Dingo” has been released, the fourth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 15.09 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 15.09, check out the manual section on upgrading.

Nix 1.10 has been released. See the release notes for a list of changes and new features.

We're happy to announce that NixCon 2015, the first Nix Conference, will take place on November 14—15th 2015 in Berlin. For more information, see the NixCon website. And please consider submitting a talk!

The NixOS Foundation was started to improve our ability to maintain and extend the infrastructure used by the Nix related projects. If you would like to support us, please go here and donate some money!

Nix 1.9 has been released. See the release notes for a list of changes and new features.

NixOS 14.12 “Caterpillar” has been released, the third stable release branch. It brings Linux 3.14, systemd 217, Glibc 2.20, KDE 4.14.1, and much more. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 14.12 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 14.12, check out the manual section on upgrading.

Nix 1.8 has been released. See the release notes for a list of changes and new features.

We’re having a NixOS sprint at the Kiberpipa hackerspace in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on August 23—27. Joining is free! For more information and to register, please go to the sprint page.

NixOS 14.04 “Baboon” has been released, the second stable release branch. It brings Linux 3.12, systemd 212, GCC 4.8, Glibc 2.19, KDE 4.12, light-weight NixOS containers, and much more. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 14.04 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade a 13.10 system to 14.04, check out the manual section on upgrading.

NixOps 1.2 has been released. This release contains contains many nice new features. See the manual for details.

Nix 1.7 has been released. See the release notes for a list of new features.

A serious security vulnerability has been discovered in OpenSSL. All stable NixOS releases prior to version 13.10.35708.15a465c are vulnerable. (You can see your current version by running nixos-version.) To upgrade to the latest NixOS version, run nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade. You can verify whether you are safe by running $ nix-store -qR /run/current-system | grep openssl If this shows any OpenSSL version prior to 1.0.1g, you may be vulnerable.

Domen Kožar gave a talk at FOSDEM about NixOS (video). Also, Ludovic Courtès gave a talk on Guix, the Nix- and Guile-based package manager.

The stdenv-updates branch has been merged into the master branch of Nixpkgs. The main change are that brings is that Nixpkgs/NixOS are now based on GCC 4.8 and Glibc 2.18, in addition to many smaller updates.

We have released NixOS 13.10, the first stable branch of NixOS. Its goal is to provide a safe branch for production environments that need bug fixes and security updates, but not the potentially destabilising changes that sometimes occur on the unstable branch. You can get NixOS 13.10 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. See the announcement for more information. For information on how to switch an existing NixOS machine from the unstable channel to 13.10, check out the manual…

Nix 1.6.1 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release but has some minor new features. See the release notes for details.

The NixOS Git tree has been merged into the Nixpkgs tree in order to simplify development. The sources now live in the nixos subdirectory of the Nixpkgs repository on GitHub. See the announcement for more information.

NixOps 1.1.1 has been released. This release consists mostly of minor bugfixes. See the manual for details.

Nix 1.6 has been released. See the release notes for details.

NixOps 1.1 has been released. This release brings a backend for Hetzner, a German data center provider, support for EC2 spot instances and some minor bugfixes. See the manual for details.

A sprint focused on NixOS and Kotti will be held 22-26 July 2013 in Lokve, Slovenia. It is organised by Termitnjak and sponsored by LogicBlox.

NixOps 1.0.1 has been released, a minor bug fix release. See the manual for details.

Domen Kožar gave a presentation at EuroPython 2013: “NixOS Operating System: Declarative Configuration Distribution”.

NixOps 1.0 has been released, the inaugural release of the NixOS cloud deployment tool. See the announcement and the manual for details.

Nix 1.5.3 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release. See the release notes for details.

Today Sander van der Burg successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled A Reference Architecture for Distributed Software Deployment! It describes (among other things) Disnix, a system for deployment of service-oriented architectures.

Nix 1.5.2 has been released. This is a bug fix release.

Nix 1.5.1 has been released. It fixes a regression introduced in Nix 1.4. See the release notes for details.

Nix 1.4 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release that addresses a security problem in multi-user mode. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

NixOS has switched from Upstart to systemd! Systemd brings many advantages such as better dependency management, socket-based activation of services, per-service logging, cgroup-based process management, and much more. (Read the announcement.)

Nix 1.3 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Nix 1.2 has been released. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Nix 1.1 has been released. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Our continuous build system, Hydra, now produces binary tarball distributions of Nix for Mac OS X (Darwin), FreeBSD and Linux. The tarballs contain all dependencies of Nix, making it a lot easier to install Nix on those platforms. To install, download a binary tarball, unpack it in the root directory, then run nix-finish-install. See the manual for more information.

After almost two years of development, Nix 1.0 has been released. See the release notes for an overview of the most important improvements. For installation information, see the manual.

PatchELF 0.6 has been released. Apart from some bug fixes, it adds support for executables produced by the Gold linker. See the README for details.

Ludovic Courtès gave a talk on Hydra at Inria (which has its own Hydra instance for building Inria software) entitled “Hydra: continuous integration for demanding people”.

The NixOS project is (slowly) migrating from Subversion to Git! The master repositories will be hosted in the NixOS organization on GitHub. For the moment, just a few subprojects have been migrated, such as Hydra and Charon. Thanks to Tianyi Cui for donating the NixOS GitHub organization.

The nix-dev mailing list has moved. The address is now nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl (web interface).

Sander van der Burg gave a talk about NixOS at the CrossDistro track of FOSDEM (video, slides).

The paper “Automating System Tests Using Declarative Virtual Machines” (by Sander van der Burg and Eelco Dolstra) has been accepted for presentation at the 21st IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2010). It describes how system tests with complex requirements on the environment (such as remote machines, network topologies, system services or root privileges) can be written succinctly using declarative specifications of the machines needed by the test…

NixOS now supports Xfce, a modern, light-weight desktop environment. It can be enabled by setting the NixOS configuration value services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce.enable to true. (Screenshot)

Nix 0.16 has been released, featuring a much faster evaluator and support for configurable parallelism inside builders. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Ludovic Courtès gave a talk about Nix and NixOS at the Libre Software Meeting in Bordeaux, entitled “NixOS: The Only Functional GNU/Linux Distribution” (slides).

Nix 0.15 has been released. This is a bug fix release. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Nix 0.14 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Long overdue, the Nix project finally has a logo! The logo was originally created by Simon Frankau for the Haskell logo competition, who kindly gave us permission to use it for the Nix project. (The snowflake motif is even more appropriate for Nix, because nix is Latin for snow.) Any further modifications are entirely our fault.

Nix 0.13 has been released. This is mostly a bug fix release, although it also adds some new language features. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

LWN.net has an article about NixOS written by Koen Vervloesem.

Nixpkgs 0.12 has been released. See the release notes for details. Meanwhile, the Nixpkgs trunk has been updated to GCC 4.3.3, Glibc 2.9 and X.org 7.4.

Lluís Batlle has updated OpenOffice.org in Nixpkgs to 3.0.1 (screenshot).

We now have a fairly complete set of KDE 4.2 packages in Nixpkgs and NixOS. Previously we had KDE 3.5, but it was rather incomplete: just kdelibs and kdebase. Now we have all that desktop goodness, such as kdemultimedia, kdenetwork and kdegames. You can enable KDE 4 in NixOS by setting the services.xserver.sessionType option to kde4. Thanks go to Yury G. Kudryashov, Andrew Morsillo and Sander van der Burg for doing the hard work on adding KDE 4 to Nixpkgs. (Screenshot 1, screenshot 2)

Nix and NixOS releases are now built in Hydra, the new Nix-based continuous build system. Hydra replaces our old Nix-based build farm, which will be phased out soon. There are several advantages over the old build farm: the build tasks for a project are scheduled and published separately, so that for instance a (fast) tarball build doesn’t have to wait for a (slow) Cygwin build; build results are stored in a database, which will enable all sorts of interesting queries; better error reporting; a…

There is an article on Linux.com about Nix: “Nix fixes dependency hell on all Linux distributions”.

Nix 0.12 has been released. The most important change is that Nix no longer needs Berkeley DB to store metadata, but there are many other improvements. See the release notes for details.

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…

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…

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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 has been released. See the release notes for details.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

There is now some basic documentation for NixOS.

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

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…

Nixpkgs 0.10 has been released. See the release notes for details.

Nix 0.10.1 has been released. It fixes two obscure bugs that shouldn’t affect most users.

Nix 0.10 has been released. This release has many improvements and bug fixes; see the release notes for details.

Nixpkgs 0.9 has been released.

Eelco Dolstra defended his PhD thesis on the purely functional deployment model.

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 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.

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?

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…

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.

The first Nix paper.