[Nix-dev] Configuration requests

[Bryan Gardiner]

On Tue, 25 Aug 2015 19:53:26 -0700
Brian Jones <asubej at gmail.com> wrote:

> Coming from Gentoo, I understand about configurations.
> 
> I'm trying out NixOS
> for two main reasons:
> 
> 1. Compile source for audio programs.
> 
> At this point, I'm not really into downloading binaries.

Also coming from Gentoo.  If you really want not to use the provided
binaries, try clearing the binary-caches option in /etc/nix/nix.conf
(on NixOS, instead set nix.binaryCaches = [] in configuration.nix).

And of course, there's no substitute for reading the excellent nix,
nixos, and nixpkgs manuals if you're packaging software.

> 2. Lock down the OS so that it cannot update.

What do you want here?  Root is always going to be able to update the
OS.  Users can update whatever they have installed in their own
profile (nix-env -q), but can't modify the system configuration.  You
could possibly limit a user's access to Nix with the allowed-users
option in nix.conf (NixOS: nix.allowedUsers).  I'm not sure how well
this works on NixOS though, since Nix is needed for any user
environment modification, and part of the point of NixOS is that user
configuration can be separate from the system's.

> Given this, can you please offer some examples for configuration for
> an Intel x86_64 Duo Core CPU? Thank you. :)

Plenty of examples on Github and here[1].  I think people tend to
stick with default CFLAGS and kernel optimizations.

HTH,
Bryan

[1] https://nixos.org/wiki/Real_World_NixOS_Dotfiles