solnix news

The COSMIC desktop runs on solnix — the graphical stack works on illumos

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A big one: the COSMIC desktop now runs on solnix. That single result validates a whole stack that had never run on illumos before — Rust (COSMIC is Rust top to bottom), Wayland, GTK4, the font/toolkit plumbing, and hardware GPU acceleration through Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver. libadwaita is one build wave away. This is the concrete proof point for the GPU/graphics phase of the roadmap, and it puts a graphical desktop within reach. Next: packaging it into a graphical install ISO/DVD — there's a 'coming soon' placeholder for that on the download page. As always, it's early and unstable, but the hard part (does the graphical stack even work here?) now has a yes.

First bootable image: v2026.08.07 (unstable preview)

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The first bootable solnix image is out: an unstable-edition x86_64 install ISO (hybrid BIOS+UEFI) and a raw ZFS-root disk image, tagged v2026.08.07. It is preview-grade — meant for kicking the tires in a VM and reporting what breaks, not for daily use. Grab it from the download page; the ISO's SHA-256 is published alongside it, and the bytes are served from the same Cloudflare-fronted cache (and seeded over BitTorrent) as everything else. This is a milestone, not a finish line: expect rough edges, and see the handbook's getting-started for how to boot it under QEMU.

aarch64 and sparcv9 cross-build artifacts in the cache

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cross-compilation from the x86_64 build hosts now populates the cache with store paths for additional architectures. This means a Nix user targeting a non-primary arch can pull prebuilt artifacts instead of cross-compiling everything locally. Coverage is partial and grows as more of the package set cross-builds cleanly; platforms without a native builder still appear honestly as "no objects yet" rather than as coverage that does not exist.

Binary cache online, distributed on B2 + Cloudflare

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The solnix binary cache is live at cache.solnix.io. Add it as a substituter in your nix.conf together with its signing key and pull prebuilt, signed store paths instead of recompiling. Objects are stored in Backblaze B2 and served through Cloudflare, so egress stays affordable for a small project. A BitTorrent/WebRTC peer layer is planned on top of this; HTTP works today and remains the fallback. See the handbook binary-cache chapter for the exact configuration.

Package search is live

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Full-text package search is live at search.solnix.io. Search the solnix package set, see which architectures each package is cached for, and jump straight to the details. This is one of the two things that genuinely work today (the other being the binary cache), and it is the fastest way to answer "is X packaged, and for which arch?"