Re:A Nix terminology primer by a newcomer
by elbear on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @04:44AM
(#23401352)
I tried to use nixos-generators recently and the experience wa frustrating. For example, I tried to generate an image in the `do` format (DigitalOcean) and a few other formats. Every time, the script (`nixos-generate`) finished running and didn't produce any output.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Hmm frankly I did not use nixos-generator before writing this post, and only generated EC2 images.
But I just tried, and it did work for me. The generated image was provided as the last line of the output.
It looked like this:
Making image hybrid...
/nix/store/ra02s6nmhfklmsrmhkd960xdqpwghgak-nixos.iso/iso/nixos.iso
When I didn't get any output, I ran it in Ubuntu 18 on a Linode VPS. But I tried to generate different formats: do, qcow, vmware.
Strange that there was no output or even errors.
BTW: I believe NixOS image generation can be run only on NixOS machine, because it needs to run a VM and that requires some kernel modules to be loaded. At least I never was able to made it work on OS X.
The nixos-infect code though will turn your Ubuntu installation into NixOS, so you might try to boot to your Ubuntu machine, convert it to NixOS and I'm hoping then nixos-generate might start working.
Note though that "do" didn't work either for me, and I didn't look to investigate why, I figured out that maybe it was because I was running it on machine on VirtualBox and not DO.
Re:A Nix terminology primer by a newcomer
by 1000101 on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @05:38AM
(#23401620)
Have you tried https://github.com/elitak/nixos-infect ? Works like a charm (with DO). It's a oneliner, you don't need to fiddle with anything. If it won't work from the user config option, just paste it in the live VPS and it will rebuild itself.
I haven't. I was trying to use nixos-generators, because at some point I want to generate a custom, stripped down image of NixOS. But until then, I might use nixos-infect, if it gets me a running instance of DO quicker.
Re:A Nix terminology primer by a newcomer
by 1000101 on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @05:57AM
(#23401713)
It's super easy and works every time. You might want to change NIX_CHANNEL=nixos-19.09 to NIX_CHANNEL=nixos-20.03 since 19.09 is the previous stable version. I use nixos-infect along with Morph so I don't care about the custom images that much - a fresh/bare NixOS is all I need to build, push and deploy the actual configuration through Morph.