4.3 KiB
Release 14.04 ("Baboon", 2014/04/30)
This is the second stable release branch of NixOS. In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages and modules, this release has the following highlights:
-
Installation on UEFI systems is now supported. See for details.
-
Systemd has been updated to version 212, which has numerous improvements. NixOS now automatically starts systemd user instances when you log in. You can define global user units through the
systemd.unit.*
options. -
NixOS is now based on Glibc 2.19 and GCC 4.8.
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The default Linux kernel has been updated to 3.12.
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KDE has been updated to 4.12.
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GNOME 3.10 experimental support has been added.
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Nix has been updated to 1.7 (details).
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NixOS now supports fully declarative management of users and groups. If you set
users.mutableUsers
tofalse
, then the contents of/etc/passwd
and/etc/group
will be congruent to your NixOS configuration. For instance, if you remove a user fromusers.extraUsers
and runnixos-rebuild
, the user account will cease to exist. Also, imperative commands for managing users and groups, such asuseradd
, are no longer available. Ifusers.mutableUsers
istrue
(the default), then behaviour is unchanged from NixOS 13.10. -
NixOS now has basic container support, meaning you can easily run a NixOS instance as a container in a NixOS host system. These containers are suitable for testing and experimentation but not production use, since they're not fully isolated from the host. See for details.
-
Systemd units provided by packages can now be overridden from the NixOS configuration. For instance, if a package
foo
provides systemd units, you can say:{ systemd.packages = [ pkgs.foo ]; }
to enable those units. You can then set or override unit options in the usual way, e.g.
{ systemd.services.foo.wantedBy = [ "multi-user.target" ]; systemd.services.foo.serviceConfig.MemoryLimit = "512M"; }
When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes:
-
Nixpkgs no longer exposes unfree packages by default. If your NixOS configuration requires unfree packages from Nixpkgs, you need to enable support for them explicitly by setting:
{ nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true; }
Otherwise, you get an error message such as:
error: package ‘nvidia-x11-331.49-3.12.17’ in ‘…/nvidia-x11/default.nix:56’ has an unfree license, refusing to evaluate
-
The Adobe Flash player is no longer enabled by default in the Firefox and Chromium wrappers. To enable it, you must set:
{ nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true; nixpkgs.config.firefox.enableAdobeFlash = true; # for Firefox nixpkgs.config.chromium.enableAdobeFlash = true; # for Chromium }
-
The firewall is now enabled by default. If you don't want this, you need to disable it explicitly:
{ networking.firewall.enable = false; }
-
The option
boot.loader.grub.memtest86
has been renamed toboot.loader.grub.memtest86.enable
. -
The
mysql55
service has been merged into themysql
service, which no longer sets a default for the optionservices.mysql.package
. -
Package variants are now differentiated by suffixing the name, rather than the version. For instance,
sqlite-3.8.4.3-interactive
is now calledsqlite-interactive-3.8.4.3
. This ensures thatnix-env -i sqlite
is unambiguous, and thatnix-env -u
won't "upgrade"sqlite
tosqlite-interactive
or vice versa. Notably, this change affects the Firefox wrapper (which provides plugins), as it is now calledfirefox-wrapper
. So when usingnix-env
, you should donix-env -e firefox; nix-env -i firefox-wrapper
if you want to keep using the wrapper. This change does not affect declarative package management, since attribute names likepkgs.firefoxWrapper
were already unambiguous. -
The symlink
/etc/ca-bundle.crt
is gone. Programs should instead use the environment variableOPENSSL_X509_CERT_FILE
(which points to/etc/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt
).