Build Your Own NixOS Installer ISO

Discord server: / discord
Donations: ko-fi.com/vimjoyer
Code from the video: github.com/vimjoyer/custom-in...

[@hakovatube]

Thank you for filling the gap of NixOS not having an easy to understand documentation with your tutorial videos. For those of us who are not programmers, your videos provide a working system to start from and learn with experimentation.

[@GoldenBeholden]

I thought this would be on the far end of diminishing returns when it comes to productivity, but I had no idea it is so easy to do. Thanks for sharing.

[@vimjoyer]

You can do it in less than 3 minutes 😁

[@meisteravinderweise4893]

I think the best part of this is not an installer, but a general portable live session. You can have your normal fully working NixOS on a USB. Now just partition the USB into a NixOS partition and a storage partition and you even have permanent storage... assuming you figure out how to properly boot the entire thing... that's the part where I'm stuck on rn

[@xaviduds]

next video: declare your linux kernel with nix language

[@das_9677]

I've actually been trying to figure this out for weeks! Just as a suggestion: time stamps would be really convenient, especially if parts are intended to be skipped

[@sfuentesojeda]

I was really needing something like this! thank you for everything and congrats for reaching 10k!

[@stimpson_]

I'm planning on installing NixOS after getting comfortable in a VM. Your content has been so helpful and I look forward to seeing more!

[@wojownikwody1804]

Learning all this stuff was a tough process, but it was well worth it. First, switching from Windows/MacOS to Linux, then learning and configuring window managers, neovim, tmux etc. and finally being able to store all that work in a repo and replicate anywhere I want is simply priceless. When I look back at times where I was using Windows and VS Code, I can see how SLOW I was with my work. This works for me mostly because I have a lot of computers and having a single source of truth in GIT for all of them is a blessing, seriously. Fun fact: investing all this time and effort helped me to actually save tons of time now and do more things that I like outside tech. P.S - NixOS documentation SUCKS big time. This system is amazing, but seriously... having a proper documentation would help A LOT. I almost gave up a few times. :))

[@Grizzlywer]

You are the nix goat

[@unknown-otter]

Thank you, once again! When you started these videos, I mostly liked them and wrote something for the algorithm but didn't actually watched most them, haha Switched to nixos in early January and never looking back, I think!

[@Anonymous4045]

Just had to do this to get some proprietary realtek wifi drivers during install, useful stuff.

[@angeldude101]

Rather than an ISO image, I instead made a netboot image packaged into a UKI that now lives in my boot partition. Perhaps the craziest part is how thanks to kexec, it might be possible for me to turn this rescue image into my boot manager, since it can mount my root filesystem and access the kernels on it while GRUB cannot.

[@catto-from-heaven]

Keep it up man

[@alexstone691]

I may try this to build a minimal rescue iso file

[@notgate2624]

hm I expected this to talk about how to create an iso out of your current configuration

[@vimjoyer]

Just import your config modules in your newly created configuration.nix. Or if your main configuration.nix is monolithic, you can straight up copy all the options you need to it.

[@picklechill]

Nice

[@oserodal2702]

Hello and thanks for the content. Can you do a full video on disko (as you've referenced in one of your earlier videos)?

[@vimjoyer]

Of course, but I want to make some other videos that I promised earlier first

[@Robin_Goodfellow]

Maybe I'll try it this way next time. The regular installer didn't generate any boot entries when I first installed NixOS, so it didn't boot at all. I had to manually chroot the new installation and nixos-rebuild switch to get the first boot entry.

[@federicodamian4039]

If `nixos-install` fails you can just run it again, `nixos-install` is more or less a simple wrapper around chrooting and running `nixos-rebuild`. In fact, you can run it as many times as you need, even after changing the system configuration.

[@kirillschirov1322]

Where i can look your color theme, it's so beautiful...I want the same thing, It's not just a gruvbox, is it?

[@vimjoyer]

It is

[@SP-kc3fq]

No idea it was this easy lol. By any chance, do you have any reference to make an iso image with the entire desktop environment? Im trying to copy my set up from a laptop to another pc but i dont wanna reconfigure everything

[@vimjoyer]

Unless you have configured your DE with nix, moving it to a new host would probably be just as problematic as on any other distro.

[@SP-kc3fq]

@vimjoyer this is probably a dumb question, but by nix, u mean nixos right? Cuz that's wut I'm using

[@flashgnash]

Is there any way to create a custom installer that will install the system already with your configuration? As far as I'm aware this method only installs this configuration to the live boot environment, I would like to make the installer use my config for the final system rather than me have to manually clone it down and rebuild after installation

[@vimjoyer]

The official NixOS Calamares installer is essentially Calamares with a couple of patches. So you can create a derivation and patch it with your custom installation steps

[@Orphan-Source]

how did you figure out nixos-generators? i was struggling with this forever. Where is the tutorial???

[@vimjoyer]

Bits and pieces of documentation everywhere, just like with everything NixOS-related

[@Orphan-Source]

@@vimjoyer we need a docs-manager at this point

[@user-rj5kt3ft8w]

slavic detected

[@infernocop31]

What about a tutorial on how to package things for nixos?

[@vimjoyer]

I have a video about derivations, but it's getting old. I'll probably remake it later

[@hakovatube]

While following this guide, I hit a roadblock that I cannot overcome. In the initial configuration.nix I had both "networking.wireless.enable = true;" AND "networking.networkmanager.enable = true;" settings. Creating the ISO image failed with the error "Failed assertions: You can not use networking.networkmanager with networking.wireless. Except if you mark some interfaces as unmanaged by NetworkManager." Since then, I deleted the "networking.wireless.enable = true;" setting from the relevant configuration.nix file but cannot get rid of the error message when creating the ISO image. Is there some cache that I need to clean? What am I missing?

[@vimjoyer]

You could try `--option eval-cache=false`

[@hakovatube]

​@@vimjoyerThank you so much for the response!. Unfortunately it didn't work and gave me the following error: “/nix/store/26rq7a86pcxqgr0kc3ivmwm6ns3v4668-nixos-generators-1.8.0/bin/.nixos-generate-wrapped: line 83: $3: unbound variable”. I am not sure what it means, but I don't want to occupy your space and time for troubleshooting with me. Is Discord the main discussion space for Nixos or is there an alternative that is as or more active?

[@hakovatube]

@@vimjoyer Thank you for the response! Unfortunately it didn't work with an obscure error message: “/nix/store/26rq7a86pcxqgr0kc3ivmwm6ns3v4668-nixos-generators-1.8.0/bin/.nixos-generate-wrapped: line 83: $3: unbound variable”. I will look for help in forums and other venues to figure this out. Thanks again!