[Nix-dev] new user impressions

[Roman Cheplyaka]

* Eelco Dolstra <e.dolstra at tudelft.nl> [2008-05-20 13:17:35+0200]
> 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...

I can test it when it's done. Currently I use standard pppd daemon with
pppoe user-space driver[1]. It's also good idea to include pptp
client[2], and I can test it too.

>> 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?

I downloaded nixos-0.1pre11797-i686-linux.iso, and ext2 filesystem was
created using mke2fs 1.40.8, inode size is indeed 256.

  1. http://www.roaringpenguin.com/pppoe/
  2. http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/
-- 
Roman I. Cheplyaka :: http://ro-che.info/
...being in love is totally punk rock...