[Nix-dev] building live DVD?

[Felix Breuer]

Marc Weber wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 02:35:46PM +0100, Felix Breuer wrote:
>   
>>  Okay, with the help of Michael and Marc, I was able to get live-dvd.nix to 
>>  build. The next step was to try live-dvd-X.nix. Here I needed to fix two 
>>  things:
>>
>>  1) Disable gw6c service. Otherwise building fails as the gw6c derivation 
>>  complains that the paths
>>     
>>>       private = "/var/elliptic-keys/private";
>>>       public = /var/elliptic-keys/private;
>>>       
>>  are missing. Which of course they are, as gw6c does not run on my build 
>>  system.
>>
>>  2) Update SHA256 sum of flashplayer 10. The tarball distributed by Adobe 
>>  seems to have changed.
>>
>>  Diffs of these two changes are attached. After these two changes, I could 
>>  build live-dvd-X.nix sucessfully.
>>
>>
>>
>>  Now I would like to run X from withing the live DVD. This I did not manage 
>>  yet. I guess because I do not comprehend nix yet. I booted nixos 
>>  successfully inside VirtualBox, selecting Rescue X with vesa at the grub 
>>  prompt. The system started just fine and I could login as root.
>>
>>  After that, I tried something as naive as "startx" resulting in "command not 
>>  found".
>>     
> :-) I'm glad you've asked. You're not alone:
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.nixos/1002/match=newcomer
> ( -> "Q: How to start Xorg ?")
>
> If you really want to start X from console manually you should have a
> a look at xlaunch or use this script:
> It extracts teh important information form the /etc/event.d/xserver file
> and writes a launch script with the same setup contents to /tmp/script2.
> I'm using it currently to trouble shoot xorg-git so that I can keep my
> normal X session running. (You can do this yourself. Just follow the
> slim configuration file which contains the X org setup settings)

I have the impression that there are some live-DVD related issues here. 
What puzzles me (and at least some of the scripts), is that the files

/etc/nixos/configuration.nix
/etc/event.d/xserver

do *not* exist. (However I am running live-dvd-X.nix and 
xorg-server-1.4.2 is in the store.) Nonetheless I tried both initctl and 
xlaunch without success:

$ initctl start xserver
initctl: unknown job: xserver


$ xlaunch
Using :0
egrep: /etc/event.d/xserver: No such file or directory
export _XARGS_=[snip]
/nix/store/[snip]-xorg-server-1.4.2/bin/X $_XARGS_

At that point xlaunch gets stuck and does not do anything anymore.


I have not tried Marc's script yet. But is there any hope for that 
script to work if /etc/event.d/xserver does not exist?

Felix