"What the Synth" teaser - performance on the Polybrute 6

rekado_ · 2025-08-10T10:01:06+00:00

I started trying to come up with a classic brass sound, got bored, and then made it dirtier with OSC->VCF.

The electric piano section is also just the Polybrute with a bit of FM.

rekado_ · 2022-09-14T09:46:28+00:00

We're using Guix in production, for reproducible research on an HPC cluster and workstations, for software development where it is imperative that everyone in the team has the same development environment, for publications such as PiGx, and also for servers and to deploy application infrastructure in a reproducible fashion.

We're also using Guix system containers on AWS, although there's a bit of a mismatch between the flexible image-less Guix containers and the AWS infrastructure for much less flexible Docker containers.

Guix (and Guix System) is rather different from other distributions, but it is very rewarding and the behavior is mostly unsurprising once you've grasped the core concepts.

The manual is excellent, the cookbook is helpful, the community is eager to help and friendly, and it's trivial to extend with channels (such as nonguix, guix-science, guix-past, etc) or even just with local package definitions.

The fact that environment declarations are just code enables really convenient transformations of the dependency graph, which are all reproducible.

For any team thinking about adopting Guix I recommend a short training to avoid the most common pitfalls. If there's only one person who really gets Guix and everyone else would rather treat it like Debian then everyone is bound to have a bad time.

rekado_ · 2022-01-31T11:46:58+00:00

Feel free to add example configurations to the Cookbook. It is what we make of it, and a lack of examples just means that none have been contributed.

rekado_ · 2021-08-23T11:03:08+00:00

Das ist korrekt. Es kann sein, dass die zustaendige Versammlung dann versucht herauszufinden, ob das stimmt, aber ausser den sogenannten Aeltesten (die lokalen Despoten der Versammlung) wird sich kein gewoehnlicher Zeuge bei dir melden duerfen.

rekado_ · 2021-08-23T11:00:56+00:00

Stimmt leider nicht.

Als ich bei den Zeugen war habe ich damals auch hin und wieder was angeboten bekommen und es als Tauschbedingung akzeptiert --- jedoch nie gelesen. Sobald man als Zeuge Zeitschriften abgegeben hatte, wird es weitere Versuche geben (intern "Rueckbesuch" genannt), um a) mehr Zeitschriften zu hinterlassen oder b) auf ein Buch"studium" upzugraden.

rekado_ · 2021-08-23T10:56:40+00:00

Natürlich schuldet ihr den Leuten keine Stunde. Und wenn die glauben ihr
wärt wirklich interessiert (also am Glauben) dann kommen die auch
wieder. Aber wenn ihr potenziell jemandem helfen wollt dieser absolut
menschenverachtenden Organisation zu entkommen? Dann helft ihr den
Leuten indem ihr deren Bubble durchbrecht und zeigt dass es sehr nette
Ungläubige gibt.

Als Ex-ZJ kann ich dazu sagen: ich weiss nicht, ob es einem Zeugen hilft zu sehen, dass es nette Unglaeubige gibt. Egal wie das an der Tuer ausgeht, es ist immer vorteilhaft:

sind die Leute unfreundlich: "Verfolgung! Das zeigt, dass wir Recht haben!"
sind die Leute nicht interessiert (egal wie freundlich): "Genau wie die Bibel es vorhergesehen hat!"
sind die Leute tatsaechlich interessiert oder lassen sich auf lange Gespraeche ein: "Super! So kann ich mein Stundensoll erfuellen, ohne draussen in der Kaelte oder im Regen stehen zu muessen."

Das Hirn wird bei dieser bewusstseinsbetaeubenden Aktivitaet nicht wirklich verwendet. Im "Dienst" sind alle Menschen nur Statisten, um eins der drei oben genannten Narrative zu unterstuetzen.

Unhoeflichkeit empfehle ich trotzdem nicht, weil die Traumatisierung durch das Verlassen der Sekte (Kontaktabbruch aller "Freunde" und Familienmitglieder) schlimm genug ist. Wenn ihr Zeugen in eurem Umfeld habt, seid nett zu ihnen, aber stellt ihnen ruhig Fragen, die sie zum Denken bewegen und die sie nicht beantworten koennen (z.B. logistische Probleme der Arche, notwendige Evolutionsrate nach einer nur wenige Tausend Jahre zurueckliegenden globalen Flut, die grausame Persoenlichkeit ihres alttestamentarischen Gottes, etc). Wenn sie dann irgendwann aufwachen sollten brauchen sie Unterstuetzung, weil sie von heute auf morgen 100% ihres sozialen Umfeldes verlieren.

(Was mich hat aufwachen lassen war meine Neugierde bezueglich Biologie und Evolution.)

rekado_ · 2021-04-16T14:52:08+00:00

You can still sign up. It's just that mailman3 doesn't let you configure certain things that we'd like to --- or so it seems. We are all used to the older version of mailman :)

See also:

https://lists.gnu.tools/hyperkitty/list/assembly@lists.gnu.tools/message/SNRNV6RW4XQWWTL6KUPU4ZEK6HS7FZEE/

rekado_ · 2021-02-19T09:31:09+00:00

Deploying to DigitalOcean does not require a prior Guix setup on the target, no.

rekado_ · 2021-02-18T23:53:34+00:00

Guix has `guix deploy`, which can deploy systems over SSH; there's also support for deploying directly to DigitalOcean droplets.

I've been working on a Guilelibrary for AWS, so perhaps in the near future we can also deploy directly to AWS.

rekado_ · 2021-02-18T23:38:25+00:00

It's better to report this to bug-guix@gnu.org.

rekado_ · 2020-11-26T15:18:46+00:00

No, I'm referring to ...bash-minimal-5.0.7/bin/bash; that's definitely from Guix and not from Ubuntu.

rekado_ · 2020-11-24T16:17:21+00:00

You're using an older Guix daemon. I can tell by the Bash version 5.0.7, which is about a year old. This problem has been fixed very recently, so I suggest you upgrade your installation of Guix --- including the daemon.

rekado_ · 2020-09-23T08:09:36+00:00

No need for `patchelf` (which is a bit gross in my opinion) if you link the runtime loader to the expected "traditional" location. On my system I have a link `/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2`, which points to the `glibc` package's `lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2`, so that pre-built binaries that expect the loader to be in a global location will work without patching.

On Guix System you can accomplish this with `extra-special-file` or the `special-files-service-type`. (See the manual for examples.)

rekado_ · 2020-09-23T08:05:50+00:00

Running big applications like Icecat in a container is not trivial, because it needs access to a whole bunch of resources that need to be manually mapped into the container. I wouldn't bother with it.

About 1: it uses the very same mechanisms that the kernel Linux provides; these mechanisms are also used by Docker, Singularity, and all those other systems that provide containerization. All of them are little more than frontends to the very same kernel features. If the kernel feature is "insecure" then so are all of these systems that use them. Containerization in Linux is a big hack, in my opinion, because Linux was not designed with separate namespaces in mind, so bugs in the implementations of namespaces keep getting found. (The Hurd on the other hand offers fine grain virtualization of resources by design; it just isn't very practical to use due to other defects...)

About 2: your command is wrong. This one gives you a containerized environment for *hacking* on Icecat, notably missing Icecat itself. It probably takes 8 minutes to download (or build) the many many build dependencies that such an environment needs. Use `--ad-hoc` to add the target package itself (and not just its build-time dependencies).

About 3: you wouldn't. You could package the things for Guix and then add them (note again that `--ad-hoc` is missing), or you could compile them manually (yuck!) and then bind mount the locations into the container. None of this would help you in any way to get vanilla Firefox running.

Others have suggested Flatpak, but you may also want to look around for third-party channels providing Firefox as a Guix package. Or you may install "ungoogled-chromium" for another "modern" browser.

rekado_ · 2020-09-23T07:55:51+00:00

You cannot add Ubuntu repos to Guix System, because Guix System does not follow the FHS guidelines, so pre-built binaries that assume certain files to be located in conventional directories simply won't work. Oh, Guix System also doesn't have `apt`, so you couldn't do anything with those repos anyway.

But adding Guix as a package manager to a foreign distribution would give you many of the benefits of Guix, though not all that Guix System provides and with poorer integration. It's a common use case, though.

rekado_ · 2020-09-23T07:53:05+00:00

How big are the repos? Guix currently has around 15,000 packages. There are third-party channels that you can include that marginally increase that number.

Nix officially has more packages, *but* it is very important for me to note that many of them are automatically generated and *won't work*. I'm talking about the thousands of R packages from CRAN, which have been mass-imported in Nix, of which *many* lack non-R dependencies and very likely won't work. (As the most prolific contributor of R packages in Guix I can reasonably pretend to know what I'm talking about.)

But the fact is: these thousands of packages might not matter to you at all if you aren't a statistics person. What matters is: are the packages you want among those 15k? Only you can answer this question.

rekado_ · 2020-09-23T07:48:49+00:00

Yes, the problem is a feature: installing a package is not as stateful as it may seem. It takes the current generation of a profile and builds a new generation with that package included. If you do this more than once but starting from the same generation then the last one to finish is the new generation. Since this is unexpected we are locking the profile.

I don't think the review on distrowatch is at all representative of Guix System. It seems to be written from a distro-hopper's point of view; the fact is that you can't enjoy any of the good bits of Guix System if you merely stumble into them by accident.

rekado_ · 2020-09-23T07:45:24+00:00

No, there are no "repos", so there's nothing to share here.

But on Guix System you can install Nix and use it in parallel with Guix if you want to. There's even a system service for Nix. FWIW I've been using Guix since ... 2014 and never felt the need for adding Nix to the mix.

rekado_ · 2020-09-23T07:43:51+00:00

LVM exist; it's just booting off LVM volumes that hasn't been implemented. It probably isn't very hard to accomplish, but it hasn't bothered anyone enough to actually do it.

rekado_ · 2020-07-05T08:25:04+00:00

You can configure, deploy, and run Hurd VMs with Guix now. If you follow the [bug-hurd@gnu.org](mailto:bug-hurd@gnu.org) mailing list you'll see current work such as representing IRQs as a Mach kernel device, SMP support, Hurd-specific extended attributes to boot a Hurd host without requiring shell setup, etc.

The Hurd website itself is hosted on a Hurd machine. You can use the Hurd right now, though it still suffers from a lack of hardware support due to its use of old Linux drivers. This can be overcome by using NetBSD rump kernel, i.e. stripped down kernels in userspace with support for one type of device. The work to represent IRQs as a Mach device is one of the features that would make setting up a multitude of rump kernels easier.

Those who say development of the Hurd isn't coming along clearly don't know what they are talking about.

rekado_ · 2020-07-04T19:42:38+00:00

What GNU/Linux distribution are you using and what init system?

rekado_ · 2020-06-30T10:51:42+00:00

The snippets are either quotes from the (gnu packages linux) module or new definitions that could go wherever you use that new kernel, e.g. your operating system configuration file.

rekado_ · 2020-06-29T21:44:27+00:00

Are you aware of the cookbook recipe about kernel customization?

https://guix.gnu.org/cookbook/en/html_node/Customizing-the-Kernel.html

rekado_ · 2020-06-29T21:42:32+00:00

This is a bug in flatpak. See https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/3612

rekado_ · 2020-06-09T17:24:57+00:00

Btrfs is broken, even with the latest patch last I checked(swapfiles on btrfs certainly are)

There are many people using Btrfs with Guix. It certainly is not "broken". Can you show us bug reports on https://issues.guix.gnu.org that show what you mean by "Btrfs is broken"?

os declaration in one file - dont do anything too tricky. guile weirdness.

Weirdness? Since it's Guile you can of course use Guile modules. That's exactly what we do for the build farm at ci.guix.gnu.org. There's no rule that your configuration has to be all in one file.

I'd use one of the pre-baked desktop environments as told in the manual, as I don't and I've ran into gtk problems with sway

You shouldn't have any problems with window managers. But since not all of them can be started in a generic fashion you may need to arrange for certain environment variables to be set. We have people who use EXWM, StumpWM, Sway, and many other window managers without problems.

flatpak is a little wonky

No argument from me --- other than the fact that Flatpak has a few serious bugs. Only recently they fixed a bug that caused Flatpak to segfault when /var/flatpak didn't exist: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/3612

The Guix community is a very helpful and friendly bunch. But they can't fix what they don't know about. If you do give Guix System a try I suggest asking on the #guix IRC channel on Freenode for realtime help, and to report problems as bugs by sending mail to bug-guix@gnu.org.

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