My NixOS Configuration

A collection of my (hopefully) growing NixOS Config

Shoutout to:

• @CRTified for introducing me to it :)

• Wil T as he posts a lot of helpfule videos about Nix(OS) and also is essentially the reason i could write this tutorial.

Installation from Live-CD

Since my brain is very wonky, i rather want to type this down so that in the case, when i actually want to swap permanently to Linux (from Windows) i am able to reproduce my full system.

Step 1: Partition drives.

I would do it the following way:

Set-up the main (boot) partition as GPT (EFI) which has 2 partitions as follows:

/dev/sda1 as boot drive which is +~ 200M in size and formatted as FAT32 /dev/sda2 as 'rest' drive, formatted as ext4

Hint: using lsblk shows your connected drives.

To do this, i preferr using fdisk.

Step 2: Formatting

Simple enough, there is an easy formular to do that:

sudo mkfs.fat -F 32 /dev/sda1
sudo fatlabel /dev/sda1 NIXBOOT
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2 -L NIXMAIN

The names are as simply described within /nixos-config/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix

Step 3: Mounting

Straight forward process.

sudo mount /dev/disk/by-label/NIXMAIN /mnt
sudo mkdir /mnt/boot
sudo mount /dev/disk/by-label/NIXBOOT /mnt/boot

Step 4: Swapfile

Also very easy to understand, a swapfile is essentially 'extended memory' where the CPU can use the size of the swapfile as extra Memory once its space runs out.

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/.swapfile bs=1024 count=2097152
sudo chmod 600 /mnt/.swapfile
sudo mkswap /mnt/.swapfile

Now this is a bit more interesting.

To have a better overview of what the dd command does: if can be unfolded to 'infile' so what i want to use to write the file with. /dev/zero is just zeros as the name implies.

of is the target 'outfile'

bs=1024 is the 'blocksize'

count=2097152 is a magic number, esentially blocksize and count will be multiplied together, to get the final size of the swapfile. Multiplying those numbers together will get you around 2GiB.

Step 5: Actual configuration

This process is also straight forward:

sudo nixos-generate-config --root /mnt

From here, this repository takes over.

However: Do NOT overwrite the hardware-configuration.nix but rather use the one in this repository as some kind of template.

Once everything is done, the fun part begins:

sudo nixos-install

And that's essentially it.

After some time you will most likely be prompted to type in a new superuser password, just type in the actual password and that's it for the standard configuration.

Step 6: Home-Manager

Just add the Home-Manager to your nix-channel and let it do the magic.

sudo nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/release-[your-nixos-version].tar.gz home-manager
sudo nix-channel --update

For more information regarding the Home-Manager, use this Link

Step 7: Flakes

With the recent changes i adopted my configuration to make use of Nix flakes.

Keep in mind that flakes can only be used with the nix flake feature enabled. e.g.:

{
  nix = {
    package = pkgs.nixUnstable;
    extraOptions = ''
      experimental-features = nix-command flakes
    '';
  };
}

For now the usage of the flakes is (to install a flake profile):

sudo nixos-rebuild switch --flake '.#[profile]'

This is however most likely not the final version of it, as hardware information configuration are completely absent for now.