It's now possible to install the OS on Btrfs partitions

May 22, 2017 23:42 GMT  ·  By

Ludovic Courtès of the GNU Guix project was happy to announce today the release and general availability of the GuixSD GNU/Linux 0.13.0 distribution and the GNU Guix 0.13.0 package manager.

The GNU Guix and GuixSD 0.13.0 releases are here about five months after the December 2016 launch of version 0.12.0, and it appears to be a major milestone implementing a few important changes. First off, this release can now be installed on computers powered by AArch64 (64-bit ARM) processors.

"This release does not include a binary installation tarball though, and our build farm does not provide AArch64 substitutes yet. We are looking for AArch64 hardware to address this. Please get in touch with us if you can help," said Ludovic Courtès in today's announcement. "Likewise, this release no longer includes a mips64el tarball."

However, the Guix System Distribution (GuixSD) 0.13.0 release can be installed on computers running MIPS64el (64-bit MIPS Little Endian) processors, but the development team is still deciding if they'll continue to support the MIPS64el architecture in the long run or not, so get in touch with them if it affects you.

UEFI support is now supported by the GuixSD installation image

Another major change of the Guix System Distribution (GuixSD) 0.13.0 release is the implementation of UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support in the installation image, along with the ability to install the operating system on Btrfs partitions.

Moreover, you can now run system services in isolated containers, create standalone binary bundles using the new "guix pack" command, and better distribute binaries to a large number of users using the new "--cache" operation mode injected into the "guix publish" command.

Under the hood, Guix System Distribution (GuixSD) 0.13.0 is powered by the GNU Linux-libre 4.11 kernel, Glibc (GNU C Library) 2.25, and GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 7. The GNU Guix is based on the latest GNU Guile 2.2 series, and a total of 840 new packages have been added to the system.

Last but not least, this release adds a bunch of new system services for Open vSwitch, Redis, Exim, and others, and attempts to improve the interface of existing services like the NGINX one. You can download GNU Guix and GuixSD 0.13.0 right now from our website if you want to deploy them on new systems.