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Nix OSAStatus Report

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Date: 2006-02-16

Time: 11:45

Room: BBL room 471

----+++ Speaker: Armijn Hemel

----+++ Title: NixOS: A Status Report

----+++ Abstract

The Nix software deployment system is a system that guarantees complete
and safe deployment of software. In the last few years it has proven its
usefulness in several environments. It is used in the Software Engineering
course, for the ST-buildfarm and Stratego development. A fair number of
users have installed Nix on their system next to RPM and DEB to manage
packages.

NixOS is the next logical step for Nix. It is a Linux distribution that
tries to use Nix throughout the whole system, including the kernel and also
system services. One of the main goals of NixOS is to prove that the
principles that underly Nix also work on a system level.

NixOS has been in serious development since about half a year. So far
NixOS has produced a few interesting results: things that seemd to be really
straightforward turned out to require a lot more work than expected and a
lot of other things that seemed tough to do turned out to be no-brainers.

Right now there is a functional prototype that implements many of the basic
functionalities one would expect on a normal UNIX-like system, but there is
still a lot of room for improvement.

This talk will give an overview of what NixOS is and what makes it radically
different from other Linux distributions. If time permits there will also
be a live demonstration of NixOS.

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