[Nix-dev] VMware Guest Tools

[James Cook]

On 31 December 2014 at 17:37, Brandon Martin <zmbmartin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey everyone,
>
> New NixOS user here. I have installed NixOS on my MacBook with VMware Fusion. I want to install the guest tools but am not sure how. I tried following the directions here https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installing_Arch_Linux_in_VMware#Official_VMware_Tools, but when trying to run the perl script it asks for the path for each program it uses in the script (depmod, more, rmmod, etc...). Then errors with a /bin/bash no file error (don't have the exact error right now). How should I be handling this?
>
> Thanks!

Does VMware's script assume all these programs are at hard-coded
paths, instead of just using $PATH? You might want to complain to them
about that...

As a one-time messy solution, I would install all the necessary things
(nix-env -i bash util-linux ...), then point the script to the
installed files under /run/current-system/sw/bin (if you ran nix-env
as root) or "$HOME/.nix-profile/bin" (if you ran nix-env not as root)
You'll probably need to edit the script directly to change the
/bin/bash path.

Long-term, maybe a nix expression for these tools would be useful, if
you're up to writing one.. It might actually be easier to build from
source in that case, if the source code is available. Otherwise, I
guess the expression should take bash, util-linux etc as build inputs,
and run sed on the script before running it to make all appropriate
changes, e.g. more should probably be ${util-linux}/bin/more, but I
might be misremembering the syntax.

James