Distributions and Operating Systems: GNU Guix and EasyOS

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 10, 2023

• GNU Guix: Parameterized Packages for GNU Guix

  Hello Guix!

  I'm Sarthak and I'll be working on implementing Parameterized Packages for GNU Guix as a Google Summer of Code intern under the guidance of Pjotr Prins and Gábor Boskovits.

  What are Parameterized Packages?

  One of the many advantages of free software is the availability of compile-time options for almost all packages. Thanks to its dedication to building all packages from source, Guix is one of the few GNU/Linux distributions that can take advantage of these compile-time features; in fact, many advanced users such as those using Guix on High-Performance Computing Systems and new ISAs like RISC-V have already been doing this by utilizing a feature known as Package Transformations.

  Parameterized Packages are a new type of package transformations that will be able to tweak an even wider array of compile-time options, such as removing unused dependencies or building a package with support for just a specific locale. These will have a wide variety of applications, ranging from High-Performance Computing to Embedded Systems and could also help tackle a few of Guix's issues like large binary sizes and dense dependency graphs.

• libGLX.so.0 fix for Kdenlive AppImage

  I posted about the missing libGLX.so.0 in the Kdenlive AppImage:

  https://bkhome.org/news/202305/kdenlive-appimage-vs-flatpak.html

  libGLX.so.0 is in the 'libglvnd' package, that is in mainstream Linux distributions, but not in EasyOS. It is a wrapper for different libGL packages, as explained here: [...]

• Run QEMU VM in EasyOS

  I haven't had much to do with VMs in the past, but there is a lot of interest, so looking into it.