My experience when switching to NixOS – Part 6
I've done it. This blog post is written from my NixOS installation on my new machine. Have a look inside to see a screenshot and my experience with the actual setup of a real machine with NixOS.
So, the setup is not that simple, so I ran into some issues, of course. But maybe I should list my hardware first, at least the relevant parts:
- Processor: AMD FX-8320 (8 x 3,5 GHz)
- Graphics Card: MSI AMD Radeon R9 270X Twin Frozr 2GB GDDR5
- Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3
Plus two 3TB WD drives and a 120 GB Samsung EVO SSD. I guess the other parts are not relevant here and now.
I started by doing a simple NixOS installation, everything worked. Then I
restarted it and encrypted the drives. This got me into some trouble, because it
did not work that simple. After booting with the appropriate settings (for
encryption), the bootloader was shown and after that there was just nothing
shown. It was really scary! After adding the ext4, dm_crypt and the fbcon
(which is for message printing during early boot) I got the password prompt from
luks, so everything was fine from there. I had to play around with the actual
cryptdevice configuration, but I got it working really fast. After that, I
simply copied my configuration.nix over to the machine and tried to rebuild
the system. It failed. But it failed because of a simple reason: I added a
900,000 lines /etc/hosts entry to my nix configuration before copying it over
to the machine. That was a bit too much, so I had to comment it out.
I'm running on NixOS for a few weeks now and I still have some problems, but
they are all very specialized ones. For example, I use youcompleteme as
autocompletion engine for vim. But it cannot find the standard headers, as these
are obviousely not installed in /usr/include! That's one of the issues I can
remember at the moment. But hey, it works!