[Nix-dev] new user impressions

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

Roman Cheplyaka wrote:

> The first problem I've come across is the absence of the tools for
> making internet connection (i.e. pppd, pppoe and others). Considering
> not tiny size of the install CD and necessity of the internet connection
> for installation to succeed, this is very strange.

I think the reason is that nobody has done a NixOS install in this configuration 
before :-)  The current assumption is that you have an internet connection 
already and at most (if there's no dhcp on the network) need to use ifconfig 
etc. to set things up.  But adding pppd/pppoe to the CD shouldn't be a problem, 
but someone needs to test it...

> Finally I've solved this problem chrooting into my Debian system and
> getting connection up from there. Installation went smoothly, but in the
> end there was a failure to install grub loader for some reason. Message
> was something like "grub/stage1 not read", and there was no changes to
> my boot loader.

This sounds a lot like the grub problems that others had two weeks ago or so 
(also "grub/stage1 not read").  The cause was that the latest version of mke2fs 
generates ext2/ext3 filesystems that Grub can't read (due to the size of inodes 
having changed from 128 to 256 bytes).  We have now added a patch to Grub that 
fixes this.  The latest ISOs 
(http://nixos.org/releases/nixos/nixos-0.1pre11797-7811s3qf/) should include 
this fix.  What version did you download?

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~dolstra/