In addition to numerous new and upgraded packages, this release has the following highlights:
-
The Haskell packages infrastructure has been re-designed from the ground up ("Haskell NG"). NixOS now distributes the latest version of every single package registered on Hackage -- well in excess of 8,000 Haskell packages. Detailed instructions on how to use that infrastructure can be found in the User's Guide to the Haskell Infrastructure. Users migrating from an earlier release may find helpful information below, in the list of backwards-incompatible changes. Furthermore, we distribute 51(!) additional Haskell package sets that provide every single LTS Haskell release since version 0.0 as well as the most recent Stackage Nightly snapshot. The announcement "Full Stackage Support in Nixpkgs" gives additional details.
-
Nix has been updated to version 1.10, which among other improvements enables cryptographic signatures on binary caches for improved security.
-
You can now keep your NixOS system up to date automatically by setting
{
system.autoUpgrade.enable = true;
}
This will cause the system to periodically check for updates in your current channel and run nixos-rebuild
.
-
This release is based on Glibc 2.21, GCC 4.9 and Linux 3.18.
-
GNOME has been upgraded to 3.16.
-
Xfce has been upgraded to 4.12.
-
KDE 5 has been upgraded to KDE Frameworks 5.10, Plasma 5.3.2 and Applications 15.04.3. KDE 4 has been updated to kdelibs-4.14.10.
-
E19 has been upgraded to 0.16.8.15.
The following new services were added since the last release:
-
services/mail/exim.nix
-
services/misc/apache-kafka.nix
-
services/misc/canto-daemon.nix
-
services/misc/confd.nix
-
services/misc/devmon.nix
-
services/misc/gitit.nix
-
services/misc/ihaskell.nix
-
services/misc/mbpfan.nix
-
services/misc/mediatomb.nix
-
services/misc/mwlib.nix
-
services/misc/parsoid.nix
-
services/misc/plex.nix
-
services/misc/ripple-rest.nix
-
services/misc/ripple-data-api.nix
-
services/misc/subsonic.nix
-
services/misc/sundtek.nix
-
services/monitoring/cadvisor.nix
-
services/monitoring/das_watchdog.nix
-
services/monitoring/grafana.nix
-
services/monitoring/riemann-tools.nix
-
services/monitoring/teamviewer.nix
-
services/network-filesystems/u9fs.nix
-
services/networking/aiccu.nix
-
services/networking/asterisk.nix
-
services/networking/bird.nix
-
services/networking/charybdis.nix
-
services/networking/docker-registry-server.nix
-
services/networking/fan.nix
-
services/networking/firefox/sync-server.nix
-
services/networking/gateone.nix
-
services/networking/heyefi.nix
-
services/networking/i2p.nix
-
services/networking/lambdabot.nix
-
services/networking/mstpd.nix
-
services/networking/nix-serve.nix
-
services/networking/nylon.nix
-
services/networking/racoon.nix
-
services/networking/skydns.nix
-
services/networking/shout.nix
-
services/networking/softether.nix
-
services/networking/sslh.nix
-
services/networking/tinc.nix
-
services/networking/tlsdated.nix
-
services/networking/tox-bootstrapd.nix
-
services/networking/tvheadend.nix
-
services/networking/zerotierone.nix
-
services/scheduling/marathon.nix
-
services/security/fprintd.nix
-
services/security/hologram.nix
-
services/security/munge.nix
-
services/system/cloud-init.nix
-
services/web-servers/shellinabox.nix
-
services/web-servers/uwsgi.nix
-
services/x11/unclutter.nix
-
services/x11/display-managers/sddm.nix
-
system/boot/coredump.nix
-
system/boot/loader/loader.nix
-
system/boot/loader/generic-extlinux-compatible
-
system/boot/networkd.nix
-
system/boot/resolved.nix
-
system/boot/timesyncd.nix
-
tasks/filesystems/exfat.nix
-
tasks/filesystems/ntfs.nix
-
tasks/filesystems/vboxsf.nix
-
virtualisation/virtualbox-host.nix
-
virtualisation/vmware-guest.nix
-
virtualisation/xen-dom0.nix
When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the following incompatible changes:
sshd
no longer supports DSA and ECDSA host keys by default. If you have existing systems with such host keys and want to continue to use them, please set
{
system.stateVersion = "14.12";
}
The new option system.stateVersion
ensures that certain configuration changes that could break existing systems (such as the sshd
host key setting) will maintain compatibility with the specified NixOS release. NixOps sets the state version of existing deployments automatically.
-
cron
is no longer enabled by default, unless you have a non-emptyservices.cron.systemCronJobs
. To forcecron
to be enabled, setservices.cron.enable = true
. -
Nix now requires binary caches to be cryptographically signed. If you have unsigned binary caches that you want to continue to use, you should set
nix.requireSignedBinaryCaches = false
. -
Steam now doesn't need root rights to work. Instead of using
*-steam-chrootenv
, you should now just runsteam
.steamChrootEnv
package was renamed tosteam
, and oldsteam
package -- tosteamOriginal
. -
CMPlayer has been renamed to bomi upstream. Package
cmplayer
was accordingly renamed tobomi
-
Atom Shell has been renamed to Electron upstream. Package
atom-shell
was accordingly renamed toelectron
-
Elm is not released on Hackage anymore. You should now use
elmPackages.elm
which contains the latest Elm platform. -
The CUPS printing service has been updated to version
2.0.2
. Furthermore its systemd service has been renamed tocups.service
.Local printers are no longer shared or advertised by default. This behavior can be changed by enabling
services.printing.defaultShared
orservices.printing.browsing
respectively. -
The VirtualBox host and guest options have been named more consistently. They can now found in
virtualisation.virtualbox.host.*
instead ofservices.virtualboxHost.*
andvirtualisation.virtualbox.guest.*
instead ofservices.virtualboxGuest.*
.Also, there now is support for the
vboxsf
file system using thefileSystems
configuration attribute. An example of how this can be used in a configuration:
{
fileSystems."/shiny" = {
device = "myshinysharedfolder";
fsType = "vboxsf";
};
}
- "
nix-env -qa
" no longer discovers Haskell packages by name. The only packages visible in the global scope areghc
,cabal-install
, andstack
, but all other packages are hidden. The reason for this inconvenience is the sheer size of the Haskell package set. Name-based lookups are expensive, and mostnix-env -qa
operations would become much slower if we'd add the entire Hackage database into the top level attribute set. Instead, the list of Haskell packages can be displayed by running:
nix-env -f "<nixpkgs>" -qaP -A haskellPackages
Executable programs written in Haskell can be installed with:
nix-env -f "<nixpkgs>" -iA haskellPackages.pandoc
Installing Haskell libraries this way, however, is no longer supported. See the next item for more details.
-
Previous versions of NixOS came with a feature called
ghc-wrapper
, a small script that allowed GHC to transparently pick up on libraries installed in the user's profile. This feature has been deprecated;ghc-wrapper
was removed from the distribution. The proper way to register Haskell libraries with the compiler now is thehaskellPackages.ghcWithPackages
function. The User's Guide to the Haskell Infrastructure provides more information about this subject. -
All Haskell builds that have been generated with version 1.x of the
cabal2nix
utility are now invalid and need to be re-generated with a current version ofcabal2nix
to function. The most recent version of this tool can be installed by runningnix-env -i cabal2nix
. -
The
haskellPackages
set in Nixpkgs used to have a function attribute calledextension
that users could override in their~/.nixpkgs/config.nix
files to configure additional attributes, etc. That function still exists, but it's now calledoverrides
. -
The OpenBLAS library has been updated to version
0.2.14
. Support for thex86_64-darwin
platform was added. Dynamic architecture detection was enabled; OpenBLAS now selects microarchitecture-optimized routines at runtime, so optimal performance is achieved without the need to rebuild OpenBLAS locally. OpenBLAS has replaced ATLAS in most packages which use an optimized BLAS or LAPACK implementation. -
The
phpfpm
is now using the default PHP version (pkgs.php
) instead of PHP 5.4 (pkgs.php54
). -
The
locate
service no longer indexes the Nix store by default, preventing packages with potentially numerous versions from cluttering the output. Indexing the store can be activated by settingservices.locate.includeStore = true
. -
The Nix expression search path (
NIX_PATH
) no longer contains/etc/nixos/nixpkgs
by default. You can overrideNIX_PATH
by settingnix.nixPath
. -
Python 2.6 has been marked as broken (as it no longer receives security updates from upstream).
-
Any use of module arguments such as
pkgs
to access library functions, or to defineimports
attributes will now lead to an infinite loop at the time of the evaluation.In case of an infinite loop, use the
--show-trace
command line argument and read the line just above the error message.$ nixos-rebuild build --show-trace … while evaluating the module argument `pkgs' in "/etc/nixos/my-module.nix": infinite recursion encountered
Any use of
pkgs.lib
, should be replaced bylib
, after adding it as argument of the module. The following module{ config, pkgs, ... }: with pkgs.lib; { options = { foo = mkOption { … }; }; config = mkIf config.foo { … }; }
should be modified to look like:
{ config, pkgs, lib, ... }: with lib; { options = { foo = mkOption { option declaration }; }; config = mkIf config.foo { option definition }; }
When
pkgs
is used to download other projects to import their modules, and only in such cases, it should be replaced by(import <nixpkgs> {})
. The following module{ config, pkgs, ... }: let myProject = pkgs.fetchurl { src = url; sha256 = hash; }; in { imports = [ "${myProject}/module.nix" ]; }
should be modified to look like:
{ config, pkgs, ... }: let myProject = (import <nixpkgs> {}).fetchurl { src = url; sha256 = hash; }; in { imports = [ "${myProject}/module.nix" ]; }
Other notable improvements:
-
The nixos and nixpkgs channels were unified, so one can use
nix-env -iA nixos.bash
instead ofnix-env -iA nixos.pkgs.bash
. See the commit for details. -
Users running an SSH server who worry about the quality of their
/etc/ssh/moduli
file with respect to the vulnerabilities discovered in the Diffie-Hellman key exchange can now replace OpenSSH's default version with one they generated themselves using the newservices.openssh.moduliFile
option. -
A newly packaged TeX Live 2015 is provided in
pkgs.texlive
, split into 6500 nix packages. For basic user documentation see the source. Beware of an issue when installing a too large package set. The plan is to deprecate and maybe delete the original TeX packages until the next release. -
buildEnv.env
on all Python interpreters is now available for nix-shell interoperability.