‘The half minute which we daily devote to the winding-up of our watches is an exertion of labour almost insensible; yet, by the aid of a few wheels, its effect is spread over the whole twenty-four hours.’
Benjamin Slade

Posts categorized in ‘guix’ (5)

Dealing with possessed TrackPoints on later model ThinkPads

On a new-to-me ThinkPad T440p, I’ve had the worst time with the TrackPoint. First, the stock configuration has a horrible touchpad - which shouldn’t matter if you don’t use the touchpad, but the horribleness of it is that the physical buttons that should be on the top of the touchpad, and are on the touchpads of models preceding and following the **40 line, are not there. But one can replace it, and so I did.

Guix, Nix: You are in a maze of twisty little $PATHs, some undefined

Some notes on interactive fiction/text adventure games and PATHs in Guix, and StumpWM. Maze no. 1 There may (likely is) some way of programmatically setting the X Windows PATH variable in Guix System (née GuixSD) via the base configuration (e.g. config.scm), but I haven’t been able to uncover anything that works. This is relevant for being able to use locally installed static binaries or local shell scripts via the window manager.

Confusion: PDP-10 Zork

I grew up playing Infocom, Magnetic Scrolls, and Level 9 text adventures, with the Zork trilogy, the Enchanter trilogy, Planetfall, Wishbringer, The Guild of Thieves, The Pawn, Knight Orc, and Silicon Dreams being particularly prominent in my memory (somewhat re-activated through recent listening to the Eaten by a Grue podcast). I would have played all of these on an Atari 8bit or ST computer, and didn’t have any access to anything like a mainframe, and so never actually played the original Zork, which was written in the Lisp-derived MDL language (which formed the basis for the MDL-subset Infocom-specific ZIL language used for their subsequent offerings) for the DEC PDP-10.

Dockerised Firefox on GuixSD

So GuixSD doesn’t currently package Firefox (though hopefully that is changing), but only IceCat (which is now EOL). On freenode#guix, pkill9 suggested that Firefox (and Chromium etc.) could be installed on Guix via the Nix installer (install as per instructions on their site and then nix-env -i firefox) with the following trick, create a file ~/.local/bin/firefox with the following content: # Wrapper to run the Firefox built and packaged by Nix MESA_LIB=$(dirname $(realpath /run/current-system/profile/lib/libGL.

Guix: You are in a maze of lispy little passages, (map equal? ′(′all ′alike) ′(′all ′alike))

So I finally made a serious go of running GuixSD, a GNU Linux distro which is largely built on GNU Guile Scheme (a dialect of Lisp) on one of my machines (one I had actually put together with GuixSD in mind: an X200 Thinkpad, which I Libreboot‘ed and put a Atheros Wi-Fi card in), and, to increase both the quantity and variety of Lisps involved, am trying to use with StumpWM (which is written in Common Lisp).