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
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 with the best of declarative build environment technologies available these days. The essential GNU ...| Samuel Dionne-Riel — Blog
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! https://github.com/samueldr/linux-3ds.nix This was a fun experiment. First it gave me some chance ...| Samuel Dionne-Riel — Blog
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 almost there. Can I see it in action? Yes! This unedited video shows a Pinebook (A64, 11 inch) bootin...| Samuel Dionne-Riel — Blog
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 quirks, weirdness or some would say by design, sometimes. When you're building a project for one pa...| Samuel Dionne-Riel — Blog
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 does not aim to prescribe an interface; it provides tools for the end-user to build their own syste...| Samuel Dionne-Riel — Blog
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 sharedaround, 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. This is to ensure it's not tightly coupled to a specific phone. After all, this is more about maki...| Samuel Dionne-Riel — Blog
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 unusual form factor devices. The goal is to target both existing devices and new built-to-be-open devices...| Samuel Dionne-Riel — Blog
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 that are played online. The engine used Using Flixel again (first used it in 2009) after being used ...| Samuel Dionne-Riel — Blog
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 could not convey what I wanted to in the time I had. The game's source is available at its bitbucke...| Samuel Dionne-Riel — Blog
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. Implementation of ROX-Filer AppDirs allowed me to think of a structure that would not be specifically limited ...| Samuel Dionne-Riel — Blog
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 posterity, I am posting the URL in this post also. https://plus.google.com/107460964648340498275/posts ...| Samuel Dionne-Riel — Blog
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 started as a small bash script I hardcoded for fun to try building something without mak...| Samuel Dionne-Riel — Blog
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 now on its bitbucket project page. I will host some example instructions file on this repo, but be...| Samuel Dionne-Riel — Blog
My new blog| samuel.dionne-riel.com
Nix Flakes is an experiment that did too much at once…| samuel.dionne-riel.com
DTB loading for Linux is harder than it looks| samuel.dionne-riel.com
What's in a Steam Deck kernel anyway?| samuel.dionne-riel.com
It's not about “Flakes vs. Channels”| samuel.dionne-riel.com