Documentation

This is the main page for the documentation of the Guix Home Manager. Guix Home Manager is an unofficial extension to the Guix package manager. You should install it and get more familiar with it before you try this.

The Home Manager is still quite young and under development, so expect a lot of missing features.

Layout of this Documentation

This documentation is divided into many Markdown files. This file is the main file. Most files will talk about specific configurations for specific software. Others will talk about generic issues and use cases. They are all referenced here.

Translations

This documentation is translated in other languages. To view the documentation in your language, simply add the language suffix at the end of the file name, just before the .md extension.

• Pour le français, voir README.fr.md

Specific Software Configuration

See the installation guide to learn more about how to manage your configuration and install your first managed home. You will learn that you need a configuration file, usually /data/alice/.config/guix/home.scm. The rest of this file is a set of links to specific and generic configuration functions that you can add to that file. Whenever you see a procedure whose name ends with "-home", you know that you can use it in the list of configurations, like this:

(home
  (data-directory "/data/alice")
  (configurations
    (list
      (user-home something-home-type ...)
      (user-home something-else-home-type ...)
      (user-home other-stuff-home-type ...)
      (user-home yet-another-config-home-type ...)
      ...)))

Desktop and Window Managers

• Openbox

Communication Software

• Hexchat

Security Software

• KeepassXC
• OpenSSH

Shell Software

• Bash
• Neovim
• Tmux
• Zsh

Reproducible builds

• Provenance

Package management

• Guix profiles

Common Issues

No Sound on the System

This is an issue with pulseaudio. Pulesaudio will never want to start when your home directory is read-only, even though all its configuration files and the files it will want to create are available read-write. To work around this, it is advised to run pulseaudio from the command line in this way:

HOME=/tmp/pa `guix build pulseaudio`/bin/pulseaudio --start

Unfortunately, that means you cannot configure pulseaudio through Guix. You can also add a similar line to your desktop or window manager's configuration to instruct it to start pulseaudio. However, pulseaudio sometimes crashes for non obvious reasons, and no graphical program will be able to restart it automatically with a proper configuration.