2.6 Application Setup

When using Guix on top of GNU/Linux distribution other than GuixSD—a so-called foreign distro—a few additional steps are needed to get everything in place. Here are some of them.

2.6.1 Locales

Packages installed via Guix will not use the host system’s locale data. Instead, you must first install one of the locale packages available with Guix and then define the GUIX_LOCPATH environment variable:

$ guix package -i glibc-locales
$ export GUIX_LOCPATH=$HOME/.guix-profile/lib/locale

Note that the glibc-locales package contains data for all the locales supported by the GNU libc and weighs in at around 110 MiB. Alternately, the glibc-utf8-locales is smaller but limited to a few UTF-8 locales.

The GUIX_LOCPATH variable plays a role similar to LOCPATH (see LOCPATH in The GNU C Library Reference Manual). There are two important differences though:

1. GUIX_LOCPATH is honored only by Guix’s libc, and not by the libc provided by foreign distros. Thus, using GUIX_LOCPATH allows you to make sure the the foreign distro’s programs will not end up loading incompatible locale data.
2. libc suffixes each entry of GUIX_LOCPATH with /X.Y, where X.Y is the libc version—e.g., 2.22. This means that, should your Guix profile contain a mixture of programs linked against different libc version, each libc version will only try to load locale data in the right format.

This is important because the locale data format used by different libc versions may be incompatible.

2.6.2 X11 Fonts

The majority of graphical applications use Fontconfig to locate and load fonts and perform X11-client-side rendering. Guix’s fontconfig package looks for fonts in $HOME/.guix-profile by default. Thus, to allow graphical applications installed with Guix to display fonts, you will have to install fonts with Guix as well. Essential font packages include gs-fonts, font-dejavu, and font-gnu-freefont-ttf.