nixpkgs/nixos/doc/manual/release-notes.xml

<appendix xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
          xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
          xml:id="ch-release-notes">

<title>Release notes</title>

<!--==================================================================-->

<section xml:id="sec-release-14.04">

<title>Release 14.04 (“Baboon”, 2014/04/??)</title>

<para>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:

<itemizedlist>

  <listitem><para>Installation on UEFI systems is now supported.  See
  <xref linkend="sec-uefi-installation"/> for
  details.</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>Systemd has been updated to version 212, which has
  <link xlink:href="http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/plain/NEWS?id=v212">numerous
  improvements</link>. NixOS now automatically starts systemd user
  instances when you log in. You can define global user units through
  the <option>systemd.unit.*</option> options.</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>NixOS is now based on Glibc 2.19 and GCC
  4.8.</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>The default Linux kernel has been updated to
  3.12.</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>KDE has been updated to 4.12.</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>Nix has been updated to 1.7 (<link
  xlink:href="http://nixos.org/nix/manual/#ssec-relnotes-1.7">details</link>).</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>NixOS now supports fully declarative management of
  users and groups. If you set <option>users.mutableUsers</option> to
  <literal>false</literal>, then the contents of
  <filename>/etc/passwd</filename> and <filename>/etc/group</filename>
  will be <link
  xlink:href="https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa02/tech/full_papers/traugott/traugott_html/">congruent</link>
  to your NixOS configuration. For instance, if you remove a user from
  <option>users.extraUsers</option> and run
  <command>nixos-rebuild</command>, the user account will cease to
  exist. Also, imperative commands for managing users and groups, such
  as <command>useradd</command>, are no longer available. If
  <option>users.mutableUsers</option> is <literal>true</literal> (the
  default), then behaviour is unchanged from NixOS
  13.10.</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>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 <xref linkend="ch-containers"/> for
  details.</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>Systemd units provided by packages can now be
  overridden from the NixOS configuration. For instance, if a package
  <literal>foo</literal> provides systemd units, you can say:

<programlisting>
systemd.packages = [ pkgs.foo ];
</programlisting>

  to enable those units. You can then set or override unit options in
  the usual way, e.g.

<programlisting>
systemd.services.foo.wantedBy = [ "multi-user.target" ];
systemd.services.foo.serviceConfig.MemoryLimit = "512M";
</programlisting>

  </para></listitem>

</itemizedlist>

</para>

<para>When upgrading from a previous release, please be aware of the
following incompatible changes:

<itemizedlist>

  <listitem><para>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:

<programlisting>
nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true;
</programlisting>

  Otherwise, you get an error message such as:

<screen>
error: package ‘nvidia-x11-331.49-3.12.17’ in ‘…/nvidia-x11/default.nix:56’
  has an unfree license, refusing to evaluate
</screen>

  </para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>The Adobe Flash player is no longer enabled by
  default in the Firefox and Chromium wrappers. To enable it, you must
  set:

<programlisting>
nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true;
nixpkgs.config.firefox.enableAdobeFlash = true; # for Firefox
nixpkgs.config.chromium.enableAdobeFlash = true; # for Chromium
</programlisting>

  </para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>The firewall is now enabled by default. If you don’t
  want this, you need to disable it explicitly:

<programlisting>
networking.firewall.enable = false;
</programlisting>

  </para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>The option
  <option>boot.loader.grub.memtest86</option> has been renamed to
  <option>boot.loader.grub.memtest86.enable</option>.</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>The <literal>mysql55</literal> service has been
  merged into the <literal>mysql</literal> service, which no longer
  sets a default for the option
  <option>services.mysql.package</option>.</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>Package variants are now differentiated by suffixing
  the name, rather than the version. For instance,
  <filename>sqlite-3.8.4.3-interactive</filename> is now called
  <filename>sqlite-interactive-3.8.4.3</filename>. This ensures that
  <literal>nix-env -i sqlite</literal> is unambiguous, and that
  <literal>nix-env -u</literal> won’t “upgrade”
  <literal>sqlite</literal> to <literal>sqlite-interactive</literal>
  or vice versa. Notably, this change affects the Firefox wrapper
  (which provides plugins), as it is now called
  <literal>firefox-wrapper</literal>. So when using
  <command>nix-env</command>, you should do <literal>nix-env -e
  firefox; nix-env -i firefox-wrapper</literal> if you want to keep
  using the wrapper. This change does not affect declarative package
  management, since attribute names like
  <literal>pkgs.firefoxWrapper</literal> were already
  unambiguous.</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>The symlink <filename>/etc/ca-bundle.crt</filename>
  is gone. Programs should instead use the environment variable
  <envar>OPENSSL_X509_CERT_FILE</envar> (which points to
  <filename>/etc/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt</filename>).</para></listitem>

</itemizedlist>

</para>

</section>

<!--==================================================================-->

<section xml:id="sec-release-13.10">

<title>Release 13.10 (“Aardvark”, 2013/10/31)</title>

<para>This is the first stable release branch of NixOS.</para>

</section>

</appendix>