[Nix-dev] Some NixOS beginner questions...

[Edward Tjörnhammar]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 11:01:35PM +0200, Ben Franksen wrote:
> Hi Everyone

Hello fellow newbie,

I just wanted to give you a heads up that I, as a fellow newbie, created
a completely superfluous little helper script called nixin[1] which
aggregates some common commands. It's probably better to learn the
individual commands though but it might be nice as a quick reference.
Any pull requests are welcome :)

[1]: https://github.com/edwtjo/nixin/

>
> I am new to NixOS (but not to Linux), just installed the stable (13.10)
> version and have a number of questions/comments.
>
> (1) Installation with USB stick failed during the first reboot with "waiting
> for /dev/sdb1 to appear.....". (Also, the 'boot form harddisk' entry in the
> bootloader menu did not exist.) I could install fine after I burned the
> image on a CD. It would be nice if installation from a USB stick could be
> made to work.
>
> (2) It seems impossible to install NixOS w/o installing the boot loader. I
> did not want to overwrite what's in my MBR because I have another system
> (kubuntu) on the machine and did not want to loose my boot menu. I tried
> installation to some partition but that also failed for various reasons. I
> know, this is a general problem with grub2, not partcular to NixOS. Anyway,
> after many failed attempts my solution was to create a btrfs on an unused
> partition, adding a chainloader entry to my kubuntu-maintained boot menu. A
> hint how to do that (in the NixOS manual or on the wiki) would be nice, I
> guess experimental installation of NixOS side-by-side with an existing
> system is common, considering the experimental status of NixOS.
>
> (3) I love the declarative approach to system configuration. However, for a
> newcomer it is hard to find out how to configure his favorite packages. What
> options are there and how can I set them? Is looking at the 'sources' (for
> the package's nix expressions) the only way? Related question: I tried to
> put pkgs.kdepim into environment.systemPackages, which failed for no
> apparent reason. Then I stumbled (really, by accident) over a nix snippet
> where it said pkgs.kde4.<some-kde-subpackage> and indeed adding the .kde4
> worked. How can I find out how packages are organised in the pkgs nix
> expression?
>
> (4) How do I fix something if it is broken? Note I don't want to upgrade my
> whole NixOS configuration to the unstable branch (as all the documentation
> suggests), just make one or two fixes in certain packages (e.g. the nedit
> package is currently broken, when starting the binary it crashes with some
> X11 bad opcode error). I expected the nixpkgs repository to have a 'stable'
> branch so I could check that out and work from there but such a branch seems
> not to exist. How else can I replace/fix/change the nix expression for a
> single package, leaving the rest of the system as is?
>
> Cheers
> Ben
> --
> "Make it so they have to reboot after every typo." -- Scott Adams
>
>
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