Hacker News Reader

Comment by serhart | Hacker News Reader

The official Guix channels do not package proprietary software. However, nothing is stopping someone from doing it.

Tried to install nvidia drivers (the only piece of proprietary software I needed) — no luck.

Hope that with 1.0, somebody will find a way.

The only distro I know of which packages nvidia proprietary driver not as an original blob and a bunch of scripts is Debian. To say it's a mess is understatement (list of dependencies by metapackage[0], which doesn't include all driver parts either).

[0]https://packages.debian.org/sid/nvidia-driver

edit: wording

This is trivial to do on NixOS:

  services.xserver.videoDrivers = [ "nvidia" ];

For a full install for eg machine learning, you'd want these lines, too:

  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    cudatoolkit
  ];

  systemd.services.nvidia-control-devices = {
    wantedBy = [ "multi-user.target" ];
    serviceConfig.ExecStart = "${pkgs.linuxPackages.nvidia_x11}/bin/nvidia-smi";
  };

You can download blob from official site, but it wouldn't work in a lot of cases after installation process while giving you no options for some choices there are (like GLX provider or vendor-neutral OpenGL libs), that's the difference of Debian's metapackage.

(you do need to set config.allowUnfree = true; or the nvidia stuff will be hidden)

Pop_OS! By System76 makes these accessible at the installer. It's why I chose it for a recent Lenovo laptop purchase.

So now you know of 2.

As Ubuntu does on theirs. The thing is, Ubuntu is stated as officially supported by Nvidia's blob itself, although it doesn't remove all the fun of their driver's installation and configuration processes.

Yeah I only mention pop_os because it truly is a painless process for a fresh install and that's worth calling out. Life is too short to suffer installing uncooperative Linux distros on modern laptops.

Pop_OS is based on Ubuntu, which is itself derived from Debian.

Pop_OS does not reuse Debian's packaging for this, does not do it the same way Ubuntu does. It also bundles it with the OS installer image, which can be pretty important.

These are decisions that OS authors make. Even if they are derivative, it is worth calling out these specifics. Especially if it enables painless adoption of the OS on specific hardware rather than saying "well it's just Debian."

Is it possible to convert the packages for nixos to guix? Seems like someone should create a nonfree repo for guix to allow people to simply add a new source for nonfree software.

If I understand properly this is done via GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH which works somewhat like PATH in that multiple sources are searched in order of precedence.

https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/en/html_node/Packag...

Instead of hoping that someone does it you could always do it yourself and host it somewhere everyone can benefit from.

GUIX_PACKAGE_PATH is inconvenient. We prefer to use channels instead:

https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/manual/en/html_node/Channe...

It's definitely not trivial to do. I have the Guix system installed on my mid 2013 MBP. I installed the mainline Linux kernel and drivers along with the proprietary Broadcom wireless module. Everything seems to be running fine.

Did create a package for it? Is it available?

This is going to be a deal breaker for a lot of HPC folks, so it's surprising to me that there isn't an "unofficial official" way to get non-free Nvidia drivers given Guix's aims at reproducible builds for HPC.

Sounds like you can use just the package manager, so I guess there's nothing stopping you from installing just the proprietary blobs with your system package manager and build everything else with guix?

I don't think it has Nvidia drivers, but there is work being done for Guix and HPC. https://guix-hpc.bordeaux.inria.fr/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com