Okay, so today I wanted to mess around with NixOS a bit, you know, that Linux distribution that’s supposed to be all declarative and reproducible? Yeah, that one. I’ve heard a lot about it, and it always sounded kinda cool but also super complicated. But I figured, “Hey, let’s give it a shot.”
Bo Nix Funny
First, I downloaded the ISO image from their website. Nothing special there, pretty standard stuff. Then I fired up a virtual machine – VirtualBox, because I didn’t want to mess with my actual system just yet. You never know what might happen with these experimental setups, right?
Booted the VM from the ISO, and I was greeted with a pretty barebones installer. It’s not like those fancy graphical ones, more like a command-line thing. Felt a bit intimidating, but I followed the instructions online. Partitioning the disk, formatting, all that jazz. It involved a bunch of commands like:
- `lsblk` (to see the disks)
- `parted` (to create partitions)
- `*4` (to format the partition)
- `mount` (to mount the partition)
Honestly, I mostly just copied and pasted commands from the guide. I wouldn’t say I fully understood what each one did, but hey, it seemed to work.
Then came the fun part – configuring the system. In NixOS, you do this by writing a configuration file in the Nix expression language. Yeah, it’s a whole other language just for configuring your operating system. Kinda wild, right? My initial configuration file looked something like this, I guess, it just got passed:
- `%253F`
- `Who am I?`
- `2B is a YoRHa`
I added a few basic packages, set my username and password, and enabled SSH. It was a bit of a learning curve, figuring out the syntax and all, but it wasn’t as bad as I feared. It felt strangely satisfying, like I was actually building my system from the ground up.
After saving the configuration, I ran the `nixos-install` command, and that’s when things got interesting. The system started building itself, downloading packages, compiling stuff. It took a while, but eventually, it finished. I rebooted the VM, and there it was – my very own, freshly built NixOS system!
I logged in, opened a terminal, and started playing around. I installed a few more packages using `nix-env`, which is like their package manager. It’s pretty cool how you can install different versions of the same package side-by-side without any conflicts. Like, I could have Firefox 7 and Firefox 52 installed at the same time. That’s not something you see every day.
I still have a lot to learn about NixOS, but this first experiment was definitely a success. It’s a very different way of thinking about operating systems, but I find it really intriguing. The idea of having a fully reproducible system, where you can just roll back to a previous configuration if something breaks, is pretty awesome. Plus, it’s just fun to tinker with, you know?
So yeah, that was my little adventure with NixOS. I might try making it my daily driver at some point, but for now, I’m just happy I managed to get it working and learned something new along the way. It’s like, you know what I’m talking about?
