Installing GNU Guix 0.6, easily

Installation of GNU Guix is straightforward, except if you follow the docs, but it’s not as if we’re not used to that from other GNU utilities, which often terribly short-sell their quality with overly general documentation ☺

So I want to provide a short guide how to setup and run GNU Guix with ease. My system natively runs Gentoo, My system natively runs Gentoo, so some details might vary for you. If you use Gentoo, you can simply copy the commands here into the shell, but better copy them to a text-file first to ensure that I do not try to trick you into doing evil things with the root access you need.

In short: This guide provides the First Contact and Black Triangle for GNU Guix.

Guix comes with a quite complete commandline interface. The basics are

• Update the package listing: guix pull
• List available packages: guix package -A
• Install a package: guix package -i PACKAGE
• Update all packages: guix package -u

For a new distribution-tool, Guix is quite nice. Remember, though, that it builds on Nix: It is not a complete reinvention but rather “stands on the shoulders of giants”.

The download speeds are abysmal, though. http://hydra.gnu.org seems to have a horribly slow internet connection…

And what I direly missed is a short command explanation in the help output:

$ guix --help
Usage: guix COMMAND ARGS...
Run COMMAND with ARGS.

COMMAND must be one of the sub-commands listed below:

   build
   download
   gc
   hash
   import
   package
   pull
   refresh
   substitute-binary

Also I miss the categories I know from Gentoo: Having package-names like grue-hunter seems very unorganized compared to the games-text/grue-hunter which I know from Gentoo.

And it would be nice to have shorthands for the command names:

• "guix pa -i" instead of "guix package -i" (though there is a namespace clash with guix pull :( )
• "guix pu" for "guix pull"

and so on.

But anyway: A very interesting project which I plan to keep tracking. It might allow me to do less risky local package installs of stuff I need, like small utilities I wrote myself.

The big advantage of that would be, that I could actually take them with me when I have to use different distros (though I’ve been a happy Gentoo user for ~10 years and I don’t see it as likely that I’ll switch completely: Guix would have to include all the roughly 30k packages in Gentoo to actually be a full-fledged alternative - and provide USE flags and all the convenient configurability which makes Gentoo such a nice experience).

Using guix for such small stuff would allow me to decouple experiments from my production environment (which has to keep working).

But enough talk: Have fun with GNU Guix and Happy Hacking!