NixOS install & labor pains

The Back Story

My first foray into world of Linux happened with Red Hat Linux 6 (original, not the enterprise one). It was magical but it didn’t stick. See, I was a kid who liked video games. So it was back to Windows until I finally got serious about programming and discovered I the development environment on Linux. So I formatted my hard drive and installed Ubuntu. I quickly learned absorbed information and slowly got bored. When Unity came out it was time to switch. I dabbled a bit with Mint but ultimately landed on ArchLinux. I really like the RTFM or GTFO philosophy of Arch because it means you learn stuff and you learn it quickly. Because you just have to. Oh, and there is great documentation. And everything was great. Until I borked my system doing an upgrade or some other system package operation. A few times. Btrfs to the rescue! But there must be a better way. (I was doing manual snapshots of the root filesystem before any potentially destructive operation.

Then I heard my colleagues talking about this amazing package manager called Nix and the derived distribution - NixOS. It’s tag lines are (respectively:

The Purely Functional Package Manager

and

The Purely Functional Linux Distribution

The Install

Being the Haskell geek I am, I needed to give it a spin. I tried the Virtual Box image but it was weird. It has KDE and I couldn’t really figure out how to alter it. So I decided to just try to do a fresh install in Virtual Box.

Turns out the manual pretty much has you covered. It’s not Arch Wiki level, but good enough to set up a minimal install without any major issues.

At this point I was so fascinated by the core concepts that I just bit the bullet - I decided to install it onto my physical machine. What could possibly go wrong?

So I just created a quick subvolume (Btrfs again!) and rebooted. About half an hour later I had a working NixOS install alongside my Arch. It was really minimal but I was happy and I built on it quickly. A few evenings of playing around later I just switched. I set up pretty much the same environment I had before so my work productivity didn’t suffer a bit. If anything it was better - now I no longer feared system upgrades because rollback had my back.

The Crash

And then it happened. My hard drive failed and there were issues with the external backup as well. I managed to recover data but not the system. No biggie - NixOS is trivial to rebuild from the config file. Or so I thought. I had to locally rebuild the world, starting from glibc. (I think it was my error for using an old boot image.) That took pretty much the whole day.

So I devised plan for re-installs which I tested out and I’m now documenting here for future usage:

1. download fresh nixos-unstable image
2. boot it and install minimal system with network manager
3. boot into the new system
4. update channels
5. fetch personal config
6. rebuild

With this approach I’m up and running an exact replica of the system in about half an hour. Yup, my hard drive crashed again. This time my backup was fine but I decided to actually go this route to test out the procedure. Works like a charm. And I also did it when a bought a new computer. It’s kind of creepy when after half an hour you are greeted by a familiar desktop on an unfamiliar hardware. Creepy but very cool.

Last modified on 2018-01-24