[Cialug] NixOS

[Todd Walton]

On 5/15/07, LancePickett00 <lancepickett00 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> That probably means multiple OS's (Windoze, Nix, Live-CD's, Mac), in use.

I'm assuming you don't mean that she'll be using NixOS...

NixOS:   http://nix.cs.uu.nl/nixos/
=================================
NixOS is a Linux distribution based on Nix, a purely functional
package management system. NixOS is an experiment to see if we can
build an operating system in which software packages, configuration
files, boot scripts and the like are all managaed in a purely
functional way, that is, they are all built by deterministic functions
and they never change after they have been built. Such an operating
system should have all the nice characteristics that the Nix package
manager has:

== The entire system — kernel, system services, configuration files,
etc. — is built by a Nix expression in a deterministic and repeatable
way.
== Since configuration changes are non-destructive (they don't
overwrite existing files), you can easily roll back to a previous
configuration. For instance, the Grub boot menu in NixOS allows the
user to boot into any previous system configuration that hasn't been
garbage collected yet. This is very nice if something goes wrong.
== Upgrading a configuration is as safe as installing from scratch,
since the realisation of a configuration is not stateful. This is a
result of being purely functional.
== Multi-user package management — any user can install software
through the same mechanisms that the administrator uses. This is not
the case for most package managers such as RPM.
=================================

It sounds very interesting.  It seems to make sense.  There's lots of
docs on the website.

-todd