Mea culpa
Mea culpa I've been told that, in fact, I did not solve package management. It's just Nix, Nixpkgs and NixOS, with extra steps, again. Be careful about new and exciting solutions to hard problems that may be sold to you all.
Samuel Dionne-Riel — Blog
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Be not afraid, for I have solved package management
Be not afraid, for I have solved package management NOTE : This was an April 1st post. Today, I am thrilled to announce the first public release of the Yixe Project . Yixe is an experimental interface to declarative build environments. Yixe is built in synergy with the best of cloud-native technologies. It integrates with the praised YAML language to describe projects and build environments, and…
DTB loading for Linux is harder than it looks
DTB loading for Linux is harder than it looks And it's not getting better, unless we act now. What do I mean by that? It's simple: the current solutions all have problems, and in the end, are all done at the wrong layer. At best, this is causing duplicated work, at worst, using wrong or incomplete data, which could lead to the system being unusable. (i.e. Drivers not working as expected, e.g. no…
What's in a Steam Deck kernel anyway?
What's in a Steam Deck kernel anyway? More than some people say. Less than is needed. There is a lot more work than strictly just work for hardware support for the Steam Deck. But also, a lot of it is unneeded if the goal is just to run a Linux, and not the best Linux that could be. Valve, entirely going against the popular definition of Vendor[pejorative] , is still actively working on improving…
It's not about “Flakes vs. Channels”
It's not about “Flakes vs. Channels” I have seen a couple of times people conflate that “not using Flakes” is synonymous to “using ‘channels’”. In reality, things are murkier than that, and anyway this simplification misses the big picture. What even are channels?? Exactly . The term channel in the NixOS ecosystem is severely overloaded. It may mean any or many of: The overall concept of…
Nix Flakes is an experiment that did too much at once…
Nix Flakes is an experiment that did too much at once… … and it sucks because so much of it is good, or are good undercooked ideas. This post is not about the implementation details. I'm not judging if the features are good or bad. This post is about the process in which it came to be within the Nix codebase. First, let's list what I see the Flakes flurry of features as: Dependency…
Linux-3DS.nix
Linux-3DS.nix Just a quick post to show off something neat I just worked on. I got nerd-sniped into looking at building linux-3ds using Nix. Well, the query was for NixOS on 3DS, but I'm not made entirely out of free time! The previous photo shows off what the login screen to the toy system you can get with the project. There's not much use really, for now. But you can give it a try if you want!…
Unveiling Tow-Boot
Unveiling Tow-Boot I have spent the past few weeks polishing up a project which might look frivolous to some, unneeded to others, but I believe it is long overdue . This project is Tow-Boot , an opinionated U-Boot distribution with a strong focus on end-user-experience. Booting your ARM SBC or ARM computer should be as boring as booting the trivial and generic x86_64 computer, and we're already…
Mobile NixOS: Breadth-First Development
Mobile NixOS: Breadth-First Development Let's first preface this with a message to you, yes you, the one wondering why this is not part of the Mobile NixOS news or documentation. It's simple, this is my personal approach to my current development style, and is not an intrinsic part of the project. Hardware is fun. There is an infinite variety of hardware, all differing in weird ways, exhibiting…
Mobile NixOS Development Log (2)
Mobile NixOS Development Log (2) I initially thought I would have a writeup of the image builder infrastructure I was working on, but it will have to wait still. Instead, here's a progress report on the project. Booting to display-manager Here's what it looks like on the asus-z00t target. Note that this is not using an interface optimized for mobile. I am stating again the fact that the project…
Mobile NixOS Development Log (1)
Mobile NixOS Development Log (1) I'm not sure what shape those update will take. Let's see what sticks. Follow-up to the last announcement The last post was shared around , but I haven't taken the time yet to answer some questions. I wanted to take time to better answer the questions. Thanks for the kind words all around! First off, by design the project does not target a specific phone or device.…
Mobile NixOS: the Present and the Future
Mobile NixOS: the Present and the Future A bit about the past Over at the NixOS Discourse instance, I made a thread about a year ago , in which I introduced the Mobile NixOS project. Explained in a sentence, it aims is to allow booting a useful nix-built, NixOS Linux distribution system on existing mobile devices . I am using the term mobile devices to describe cellphones, tablets and other…
LD23 - Another Ludum Dare
LD23 - Another Ludum Dare Another entry This hour marks the release hour of the twenty-third Ludum Dare game creation competition. I again participated, but this time, using Flixel as it is obvious that using an engine that creates binaries for each platforms hampers the potential players to actually play the game. I know I don't download the few that are compatible with Linux, but I play most…
TDWIWEEHF (LD22 Post-Mortem)
TDWIWEEHF (LD22 Post-Mortem) Last week-end, December 17th to 19th, it was time for another Ludum Dare . I took part in that Ludum Dare, just as my colleagues did, with our in-house game engine, the RedBox Engine . TDWIWEEHF The game I worked on is called 2011 : TDWIWEEHF . That title was not initially gibberish, but the line of thought I had with that original title was discarded once I realized I…
BoxFactory Development Log 3
BoxFactory Development Log 3 Small update here to say that I tagged v0.1 for BoxFactory . What's new? Bundles and AppDirs Well, first numbered release, but as I use semver , this could still mean compatibility breaking to come. I symbolically made a tag, as BoxFactory can now make proper compilations on Linux and Mac OS X, including Application Bundles on OS X and AppDir for ROX-Filer .…
Social updates for October
Social updates for October Not much for an update, but I thought I'd post a bit of something here about what I just did. My old Google+ Profile is now defunct and I created a new one using my Google Apps account, since they just allowed registration to Google+ with Google Apps accounts . If you need the URL, it's always available in the contact page and will always be the up-to-date URL. For…
BoxFactory Development Log 2
BoxFactory Development Log 2 In this entry, I introduce BoxFactory through a bit of history and a NAQ (Never Asked Questions). In with BoxFactory We always joked that we should write a build system instead of using CMake, as this would be easier than work around its limitations. This is not a joke anymore, as I set myself to actually work on a build system for our needs. A little bit of history…
BoxFactory Development Log 1
BoxFactory Development Log 1 I started development on BoxFactory in the end of September 2011 as we were really fed-up with the build systems situation we were in. In this log entry, I will introduce what led to the creation of BoxFactory. Do note that right now BoxFactory is near release, but tailored for some uses, and thoroughly undocumented. You can go have a look at what it looks like right…
My new blog
My new blog Well, I had to do it. I had to over-engineer a simple thing again. What I mean by that is I have made myself a new blog engine to power this blog. I wanted to have a static website (with pre-rendered pages), but I wanted to do it myself. I know there are other tools that do it, but they almost all had something that didn't suit me personally. What about it? It is written in bash. It is…