NixOS

News

NixOS 20.09 released

27 Oct 2020
20.09 Nightingale logo

Hey everyone, I'm Jonathan Ringer, one of the release managers for 20.09. As promised, the latest stable release is here: NixOS 20.09 “Nightingale”.

The 20.09 release was possible due to the efforts of 1313 contributors in 31282 commits. We would especially like to thank our top 10 contributors: Mario Rodas, Frederik Rietdijk, Jörg Thalheim, Maximilian Bosch, Jonathan Ringer, Jan Tojnar, Daniël de Kok, WORLDofPEACE, Florian Klink, José Romildo Malaquias.

NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution and is in the top three by total number of packages.

This didn't stop us. In the last six months:

  • 7349 packages were added,
  • 8181 packages were removed,
  • 14442 packages were updated.

Likewise our NixOS module system got bigger and better:

  • 1119 options were added (61 new modules),
  • 476 options removed,
  • 118 options were updated.

Stabilization Contributors

Stabilization of the NixOS happens a month before planned release. The goal is to have as little as possible continuous integration (Hydra) jobs failing before the release is cut. While we would like to release on time, a high quality release is more important.

Individuals who contributed to stabilizing this release: volth, Robert Scott, Tim Steinbach, WORLDofPEACE, Maximilian Bosch, Thomas Tuegel, Doron Behar, Vladimír Čunát, Jonathan Ringer, Maciej Krüger.

Reflections and Closing

I think that the 20.09 release highlighted a few weak points with our current release schedule. Discussions have already began on how to improve the process from the beginning, to help minimize risk, and set ourselves up for more successes in the future. I also want to thank WORLDofPEACE (my co-release-manager) for helping me with release management items, Thomas Tuegel for helping with Qt and Plasma stabilization, as well as Robert Scott for his work with release stabilization.

NixOS 20.03 released

20 Apr 2020
20.03 Markhor logo

Hey everyone, I am worldofpeace, one of the release managers for 20.03. As promised, the most glittered stable release is here: NixOS 20.03 “Markhor” ✨.

NixOS 20.03 Contributors

We had 1014 people contribute to NixOS 20.03 and 21597 contributions. Thank you soo much, each contribution is valued.

Top 10 ordered by commits

Rank Name Commits
1 Frederik Rietdijk 1573
2 worldofpeace 1273
3 Mario Rodas 1256
4 Maximilian Bosch 720
5 Jan Tojnar 491
6 Jonathan Ringer 477
7 Jörg Thalheim 414
8 Florian Klink 393
9 Will Dietz 373
10 volth 356

My Reflections and Closing

Being release manager for 20.03 has been a poignant moment for me in being part of NixOS. I had my goals that I set out before I was appointed, but I was really surprised how respected I am in the community. My primary goal was “work collaboratively with all participants in the NixOS project and being supportive of their efforts”. I feel I ✨ shine best in that dynamic in the project, so this really was perfect for me. I hope releasing NixOS has felt better for those involved. With the seeds I’ve planted it should continue to bloom this way.

I’d like to thank Samuel Leathers, my co-release manager, for his congruent effervescence and guidance; Graham Christensen for his organizational encouragement; and obviously every last person I got to work with. Thanks ✌️

In leisure, pause, and experimental grace. worldofpeace.

NixOS 19.09 released

Oct 09 2019
19.09 Loris logo NixOS 19.09 “Loris” has been released, the twelfth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 19.09 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 19.09, check out the manual section on upgrading.

NixOS 19.03 released

Apr 10 2019
19.03 Koi logo NixOS 19.03 “Koi” has been released, the eleventh stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 19.03 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 19.03, check out the manual section on upgrading.

NixOS 18.09 released

Oct 06 2018
18.09 Jellyfish logo NixOS 18.09 “Jellyfish” has been released, the tenth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 18.09 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 18.09, check out the manual section on upgrading.

Fastly supports NixOS

Oct 04 2018
We are happy to announce that we have moved our binary cache to Fastly. Fastly is a big supporter of open source projects and now NixOS is one of them! Fastly provides us with CDN capability, which previously was running on AWS CloudFront. Big thanks go to Fastly, in particular Tom Denniston and Elaine Greenberg, our friends at Infor and Packet.com and Graham Christensen for making this possible.

Nix 2.1 released

02 Sep 2018
Nix 2.1 has been released. See the release notes for a list of changes and new features.

NixOS Discourse forum

14 Aug 2018
The nix-devel mailing list is now replaced by our discourse forum instance which is also usable by email: discourse.nixos.org.

NixCon 2018

21 May 2018
We're happy to announce that NixCon 2018, the third Nix Conference, will take place October 25-27 2018 in London For more information, see the NixCon 2018 website. And please consider submitting a talk!

NixOS 18.03 released

04 Apr 2018
18.03 Impala logo NixOS 18.03 “Impala” has been released, the ninth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 18.03 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 18.03, check out the manual section on upgrading.

Nix 2.0 released

22 Feb 2018
Nix 2.0 has been released. See the release notes for a list of changes and new features.

NixOS 17.09 released

02 Oct 2017
NixOS 17.09 “Hummingbird” has been released, the eigth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 17.09 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 17.09, check out the manual section on upgrading.

Nix-dev mailing list moved

12 Jul 2017
The nix-dev mailing list has moved to nix-devel on Google Groups.

NixCon 2017

18 Jun 2017
We're happy to announce that NixCon 2017, the second Nix Conference, will take place October 28–31 2017 in Munich For more information, see the NixCon 2017 website. And please consider submitting a talk!

NixOS 17.03 released

31 Mar 2017
NixOS 17.03 “Gorilla” has been released, the seventh stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 17.03 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 17.03, check out the manual section on upgrading.

NixOS 16.09 released

03 Oct 2016
NixOS 16.09 “Flounder” has been released, the sixth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 16.09 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 16.09, check out the manual section on upgrading.

NixOps 1.4 released

20 Jul 2016
NixOps 1.4 has been released. This release contains contains many nice new features. See the manual for details.

NixOS 16.03 released

01 May 2016
NixOS 16.03 “Emu” has been released, the fifth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 16.03 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 16.03, check out the manual section on upgrading.

Nix 1.11 released

19 Feb 2016
Nix 1.11 has been released. See the release notes for a list of changes and new features.

NixOS 15.09 released

30 Oct 2015
NixOS 15.09 “Dingo” has been released, the fourth stable release branch. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 15.09 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 15.09, check out the manual section on upgrading.

Nix 1.10 released

03 Oct 2015
Nix 1.10 has been released. See the release notes for a list of changes and new features.

NixCon 2015

03 Sep 2015
NixCon logo We're happy to announce that NixCon 2015, the first Nix Conference, will take place on November 14—15th 2015 in Berlin. For more information, see the NixCon website. And please consider submitting a talk!

NixOS Foundation

09 Aug 2015
The NixOS Foundation was started to improve our ability to maintain and extend the infrastructure used by the Nix related projects. If you would like to support us, please go here and donate some money!

Nix 1.9 released

12 Jul 2015
Nix 1.9 has been released. See the release notes for a list of changes and new features.

NixOS 14.12 released

30 Jan 2015
NixOS 14.12 “Caterpillar” has been released, the third stable release branch. It brings Linux 3.14, systemd 217, Glibc 2.20, KDE 4.14.1, and much more. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 14.12 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade from older release branches to 14.12, check out the manual section on upgrading.

Nix 1.8 released

14 Jan 2015
Nix 1.8 has been released. See the release notes for a list of changes and new features.

NixOS sprint in Ljubljana

30 Aug 2014
We’re having a NixOS sprint at the Kiberpipa hackerspace in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on August 23—27. Joining is free! For more information and to register, please go to the sprint page.

NixOS 14.04 released

30 May 2014
NixOS 14.04 “Baboon” has been released, the second stable release branch. It brings Linux 3.12, systemd 212, GCC 4.8, Glibc 2.19, KDE 4.12, light-weight NixOS containers, and much more. See the release notes for details. You can get NixOS 14.04 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. For information on how to upgrade a 13.10 system to 14.04, check out the manual section on upgrading.

NixOps 1.2 released

30 May 2014
NixOps 1.2 has been released. This release contains contains many nice new features. See the manual for details.

Nix 1.7 released

11 May 2014
Nix 1.7 has been released. See the release notes for a list of new features.

Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL

09 May 2014
A serious security vulnerability has been discovered in OpenSSL. All stable NixOS releases prior to version 13.10.35708.15a465c are vulnerable. (You can see your current version by running nixos-version.) To upgrade to the latest NixOS version, run nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade. You can verify whether you are safe by running
$ nix-store -qR /run/current-system | grep openssl
If this shows any OpenSSL version prior to 1.0.1g, you may be vulnerable.

Stdenv updates branch merged into master

21 Feb 2014
The stdenv-updates branch has been merged into the master branch of Nixpkgs. The main change are that brings is that Nixpkgs/NixOS are now based on GCC 4.8 and Glibc 2.18, in addition to many smaller updates.

NixOS 13.10 released

01 Dec 2013
We have released NixOS 13.10, the first stable branch of NixOS. Its goal is to provide a safe branch for production environments that need bug fixes and security updates, but not the potentially destabilising changes that sometimes occur on the unstable branch. You can get NixOS 13.10 ISOs and VirtualBox appliances from the download page. See the announcement for more information. For information on how to switch an existing NixOS machine from the unstable channel to 13.10, check out the manual section on upgrading.

Nix 1.6.1 released

28 Nov 2013
Nix 1.6.1 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release but has some minor new features. See the release notes for details.

NixOps 1.1.1 released

02 Nov 2013
NixOps 1.1.1 has been released. This release consists mostly of minor bugfixes. See the manual for details.

NixOps 1.1 released

09 Oct 2013
NixOps 1.1 has been released. This release brings a backend for Hetzner, a German data center provider, support for EC2 spot instances and some minor bugfixes. See the manual for details.

NixOps 1.0.1 released

11 Aug 2013
NixOps 1.0.1 has been released, a minor bug fix release. See the manual for details.

NixOps 1.0 released

25 Jul 2013
NixOps 1.0 has been released, the inaugural release of the NixOS cloud deployment tool. See the announcement and the manual for details.

Nix 1.5.3 released

17 Jul 2013
Nix 1.5.3 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release. See the release notes for details.

Nix 1.5.2 released

13 Jun 2013
Nix 1.5.2 has been released. This is a bug fix release.

Nix 1.5.1 released

28 Mar 2013
Nix 1.5.1 has been released. It fixes a regression introduced in Nix 1.4. See the release notes for details.

Nix 1.4 released

26 Mar 2013
Nix 1.4 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release that addresses a security problem in multi-user mode. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

NixOS switched to systemd

21 Feb 2013
NixOS has switched from Upstart to systemd! Systemd brings many advantages such as better dependency management, socket-based activation of services, per-service logging, cgroup-based process management, and much more. (Read the announcement.)

Nix 1.3 released

05 Feb 2013
Nix 1.3 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Nix 1.2 released

06 Jan 2013
Nix 1.2 has been released. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Nix 1.1 released

18 Aug 2012
Nix 1.1 has been released. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Binary Nix tarballs available

24 Jun 2012
Our continuous build system, Hydra, now produces binary tarball distributions of Nix for Mac OS X (Darwin), FreeBSD and Linux. The tarballs contain all dependencies of Nix, making it a lot easier to install Nix on those platforms. To install, download a binary tarball, unpack it in the root directory, then run nix-finish-install. See the manual for more information.

Nix 1.0 released

11 Jun 2012
After almost two years of development, Nix 1.0 has been released. See the release notes for an overview of the most important improvements. For installation information, see the manual.

PatchELF 0.6 released

07 Dec 2011
PatchELF 0.6 has been released. Apart from some bug fixes, it adds support for executables produced by the Gold linker. See the README for details.

Moving to GitHub

28 Nov 2011
The NixOS project is (slowly) migrating from Subversion to Git! The master repositories will be hosted in the NixOS organization on GitHub. For the moment, just a few subprojects have been migrated, such as Hydra and Charon. Thanks to Tianyi Cui for donating the NixOS GitHub organization.

Nix-dev mailing list moved

14 Oct 2011
The nix-dev mailing list has moved. The address is now nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl (web interface).

ISSRE paper on NixOS-based system testing

18 Sep 2010
The paper “Automating System Tests Using Declarative Virtual Machines” (by Sander van der Burg and Eelco Dolstra) has been accepted for presentation at the 21st IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2010). It describes how system tests with complex requirements on the environment (such as remote machines, network topologies, system services or root privileges) can be written succinctly using declarative specifications of the machines needed by the test environment. From these specifications we can automatically instantiate (networks of) virtual machines. This is what we use for automated regression testing of NixOS itself. A draft of the paper is available.

Xfce in NixOS

18 Sep 2010
Xfce screenshot NixOS now supports Xfce, a modern, light-weight desktop environment. It can be enabled by setting the NixOS configuration value services.xserver.desktopManager.xfce.enable to true. (Screenshot)

Nix 0.16 released

17 Sep 2010
Nix 0.16 has been released, featuring a much faster evaluator and support for configurable parallelism inside builders. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Nix 0.15 released

17 Apr 2010
Nix 0.15 has been released. This is a bug fix release. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Nix 0.14 released

04 Mar 2010
Nix 0.14 has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Nix logo

25 Dec 2009
Nix       logo Long overdue, the Nix project finally has a logo! The logo was originally created by Simon Frankau for the Haskell logo competition, who kindly gave us permission to use it for the Nix project. (The snowflake motif is even more appropriate for Nix, because nix is Latin for snow.) Any further modifications are entirely our fault.

Nix 0.13 released

05 Dec 2009
Nix 0.13 has been released. This is mostly a bug fix release, although it also adds some new language features. See the release notes for details. For installation information, see the manual.

Nixpkgs 0.12 released

24 May 2009
Nixpkgs 0.12 has been released. See the release notes for details. Meanwhile, the Nixpkgs trunk has been updated to GCC 4.3.3, Glibc 2.9 and X.org 7.4.

OpenOffice.org 3 in Nixpkgs

21 May 2009
OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 screenshot Lluís Batlle has updated OpenOffice.org in Nixpkgs to 3.0.1 (screenshot).

KDE 4.2 in Nixpkgs/NixOS

07 May 2009
KDE 4.2 screenshot We now have a fairly complete set of KDE 4.2 packages in Nixpkgs and NixOS. Previously we had KDE 3.5, but it was rather incomplete: just kdelibs and kdebase. Now we have all that desktop goodness, such as kdemultimedia, kdenetwork and kdegames. You can enable KDE 4 in NixOS by setting the services.xserver.sessionType option to kde4. Thanks go to Yury G. Kudryashov, Andrew Morsillo and Sander van der Burg for doing the hard work on adding KDE 4 to Nixpkgs. (Screenshot 1, screenshot 2)

Hydra

05 Feb 2009
Nix and NixOS releases are now built in Hydra, the new Nix-based continuous build system. Hydra replaces our old Nix-based build farm, which will be phased out soon. There are several advantages over the old build farm: the build tasks for a project are scheduled and published separately, so that for instance a (fast) tarball build doesn’t have to wait for a (slow) Cygwin build; build results are stored in a database, which will enable all sorts of interesting queries; better error reporting; a better web interface; and much more. We have written a draft paper about Hydra. There are some instructions available about how to set up your own Hydra server.

Nix 0.12 released

21 Dec 2008
Nix 0.12 has been released. The most important change is that Nix no longer needs Berkeley DB to store metadata, but there are many other improvements. See the release notes for details.

DisNix paper accepted at HotSWUp

09 Oct 2008

The paper “Atomic Upgrading of Distributed Systems” (by Sander van der Burg, Eelco Dolstra and Merijn de Jonge) has been accepted for presentation at the First ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Upgrades (HotSWUp). A draft of the paper is available. It describes Sander’s master’s thesis research on DisNix, an extension to Nix that allows deployment and upgrading of distributed systems from a single declarative description. We will continue this research in the Jacquard PDS project, which has now started. (We still have an opening for a PhD student or a postdoc; please contact us if you’re interested.)

NixOS paper accepted at ICFP!

16 Jul 2008

The paper “NixOS: A Purely Functional Linux Distribution” (by Eelco Dolstra and Andres Löh) has been accepted for presentation at the 2008 International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP). It describes NixOS in much greater detail than last year’s HotOS paper, and argues why the purely functional style and features such as laziness are important for system configuration management. It also provides some measurements on the actual purity of Nix build actions. A draft of the paper is available.

Website back up

06 Jun 2008

The Nix website was down for a few days due to cooling problems in the server room causing the machine to overheat. These should be resolved now. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Jacquard grant proposal accepted!

14 Mar 2008

The Jacquard program of NWO and EZ has granted funding for the Nix-related project “Pull Deployment of Services” (PDS), which is about improving the deployment of software and services in complex heterogenous environments. The grant consists of 368 K€ for a PhD student (4 years) and a postdoc (3 years). If you’re interested in these positions, please have a look at this page, and don’t hesitate to contact Eelco Visser or Eelco Dolstra.

New NixOS ISOs

06 Feb 2008

NixOS installer online help New NixOS installation CD images for i686 and x86_64 are available, which is a good thing as the previous ones were already a few months old. The new images are Nix 0.11-based, contain Memtest86+ as a convenience, should support more SATA drives, and show online help (the NixOS manual) on virtual console 7.

Nix 0.11 released

31 Jan 2008
Nix 0.11 has been released. This is a major new release representing over a year of development. The most important improvement is secure multi-user support. It also features many usability enhancements and language extensions, many of them prompted by NixOS, the purely functional Linux distribution based on Nix. See the release notes for details.

OpenOffice in Nixpkgs

10 Oct 2007

OpenOffice screenshot OpenOffice is now in Nixpkgs (screenshot of OpenOffice 2.2.1 running under NixOS, and another screenshot). Despite being a rather gigantic package (it takes two hours to compile on an Intel Core 2 6700), OpenOffice had only two “impurities” (references to paths outside of the Nix store) in its build process that had to be resolved — a reference to /bin/bash and one to /usr/lib/libjpeg.so.

Armijn Hemel, Wouter den Breejen and Eelco Dolstra contributed to the Nix expression for OpenOffice.

NixOS progress report

22 Sep 2007

NixOS screenshot Wine now runs on NixOS! Finally we can run all those legacy applications... Thanks to Michael Raskin for adding Wine and a NPTL-enabled Glibc (which Wine seems to need). This is a nice application of purely functional package composition, by the way: Wine didn’t work with the standard Glibc in Nixpkgs, so we just pass it another Glibc at build time.

In other news, Nix 0.11 and Nixpkgs 0.11 will be released soon.

Commits mailing list

14 Sep 2007

There is now a mailing list (nix-commits@cs.uu.nl) that you can subscribe to if you want to receive automatic commit notifications from the Nix Subversion repository.

NixOS progress report

02 May 2007

KDE logo We now have KDE running on NixOS (obligatory screenshot). Just kdebase for now (Martin Bravenboer already added kdelibs a long time ago so that we could run the wonderful KCachegrind), but it contains all the important stuff (Konqueror, KDesktop, Kicker, Konsole, Control Center, etc.).

In related news, we can safely say that, rumours to the contrary notwithstanding, NixOS is not an April Fools’ Joke.

NixOS progress report

05 Apr 2007
NixOS screenshot NixOS is now almost usable as a desktop OS ;-). We have an X server, a bunch of Gnome packages, basic wireless support, and of course all the applications in Nixpkgs that we had all along running on other Linux distributions. Here are a few screenshots:

NixOS for x86_64

23 Feb 2007
NixOS now works on x86_64 machines. A 64-bit ISO is available.

New build farm hardware at TUD

23 Feb 2007

New build farmTo quote Eelco Visser: new hardware for buildfarm at Delft University of Technology has arrived.

Here’s what we have: 5 Intel Core 2 Duo DualCore machines with 1GB RAM, 2 Mac minis with 1,83-GHz Intel Core Duo-processor, another Core 2 Duo a UPS to deal with spikes in power supply, a console with integrated monitor and keyboard switches, a rack with room for a couple more machines.

Here’s what we’re going to do with the goodies. The five Intel machines and the two MacMinis (also Intel) are going to be used to crank at building hundreds of software packages. Using virtualisation we should be able to run builds on multiple operating system distributions. Read more…

Nix 0.10.1 released

11 Nov 2006
Nix 0.10.1 has been released. It fixes two obscure bugs that shouldn’t affect most users.

Nix 0.10 released

06 Nov 2006
Nix 0.10 has been released. This release has many improvements and bug fixes; see the release notes for details.

Nix 0.9.2 released

21 Oct 2005
Nix 0.9.2 has been released released. This is a bug fix release that addresses some problems on Mac OS X.

Nix 0.9 released

16 Oct 2005
Nix 0.9 has been released. This is a new major release that provides quite a few performance improvements and bug fixes, as well as a number of new features. Read the release notes for details.

Secure sharing paper accepted for ASE 2005

28 Aug 2005
The paper “Secure Sharing Between Untrusted Users in a Transparent Source/Binary Deployment Model” has been accepted at ASE 2005. This paper describes how a Nix store can be securely shared by multiple users who may not trust each other; i.e., how do we prevent one user from installing a Trojan horse that is subsequently executed by some other user?

Service deployment paper accepted for SCM-12

22 Aug 2005
The paper “Service Configuration Management” (accepted at the 12th International Workshop on Software Configuration Management) describes how we can rather easily deploy “services” (e.g., complete webserver configurations such as our Subversion server) through Nix by treating the non-component parts (such as configuration files, control scripts and static data) as components that are built by Nix expressions. The result is that all advantages that Nix offers to software deployment also extend to service deployment, such as the ability to easily have multiple configuration side by side, to roll back configurations, and to identify the precise dependencies of a configuration.

Patching paper accepted for CBSE 2005

17 Mar 2005
The paper “Efficient Upgrading in a Purely Functional Component Deployment Model” has been accepted at CBSE 2005. It describes how we can deploy updates to Nix packages efficiently, even if “fundamental” packages like Glibc are updated (which cause a rebuild of all dependent packages), by deploying binary patches between components in the Nix store. Includes techniques such as patch chaining and computing deltas between archive files.

Paper “Imposing a Memory Management Discipline on Software Deployment” accepted for presentation at ICSE 2004!

16 Jan 2004
The first Nix paper.