My avatar logoInom Turdikulov

Jul 16, 20234 min read

Nix OS pre-install guide

NOTE: The following tutorial is for EFI enabled systems.

Entry point:

Typical boot process looks like this:

Motherboard firmware (UEFI) -> FS with Bootloader -> Kernel -> Init... -> ...

And we need to prepare the first 2 steps.

0. Prepare

Boot from the USB stick and setup networking. (optionally setup SSH if you want to complete the installation from another computer)

# Configure wifi:
wpa_passphrase SSID 'PASSWORD' > /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf (optional)
systemctl start wpa_supplicant
 
# Configure sshd:
sudo -i # become root
systemctl start sshd
passwd # So we can login via SSH

SSH to installation:

ssh -o PubkeyAuthentication=no -o PreferredAuthentications=password [email protected]

Identify devices

# List block devices (physical drives)
lsblk
 
# in my case disks are: nvme0n1 nvme1n1, which located at:
# /dev/nvme0n1
# /dev/nvme1n1
 
# Configure disk drives
# You can get the UUIDs by running
# change sda/sdb to your disk
export DD1="/dev/nvme0n1"
export DD2="/dev/nvme1n1"
 
# Output of 2 commands bellow must OK
test -e "$DD1" && echo OK
test -e "$DD2" && echo OK
 
# Verify the boot mode, I'm use UEFI
[ -d /sys/firmware/efi/efivars ] && echo "UEFI" || echo "Legacy"

1. Initialize GPT partitions

# One pass secure delete all data,
# with entropy from e.g. /dev/urandom,
# and a final overwrite with zeros.
# this can take some time...
shred --verbose --random-source=/dev/urandom -n1 --zero $DD1 &
shred --verbose --random-source=/dev/urandom -n1 --zero $DD2
# less secure methods
# or blkdiscard -s $DD...
# or dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=100M ... pv /dev/zero > /dev/sdX
 
# Cleanup old partition information
# if exist!
sgdisk --zap-all $DD1 &
sgdisk --zap-all $DD2
 
 
# Create GPT partitons
printf "label: gpt\n,550M,U\n,,L\n" | sfdisk $DD1
printf "label: gpt\n,550M,U\n,,L\n" | sfdisk $DD2
# lsblk
# nvme0n1     259:0    0   1.8T  0 disk
# ├─nvme0n1p1 259:2    0   550M  0 part
# └─nvme0n1p2 259:3    0   1.8T  0 part
# nvme1n1     259:1    0   1.8T  0 disk
# ├─nvme1n1p1 259:4    0   550M  0 part
# └─nvme1n1p2 259:5    0   1.8T  0 part

2. Create File Systems

ls -l /dev/nvme0n1* /dev/nvme1n1*
 
# Check sub-partitons
test -e "${DD1}p1" && echo OK
test -e "${DD1}p2" && echo OK
 
test -e "${DD2}p1" && echo OK
test -e "${DD2}p2" && echo OK
 
# Create EFI (FAT32) filesystem:
mkfs.fat -F32 "${DD1}p1" -n NBOOT
mkfs.fat -F32 "${DD2}p1" -n NBOOT_BCK
 
# Create BTRFS raid 1 filesystem:
mkfs -t btrfs -L NROOT -m raid1 -d raid1 "${DD1}p2" "${DD2}p2"
 
# Set up mount points variables
ls -lah /dev/disk/by-label
export BOOT="/dev/disk/by-label/NBOOT"
export ROOT="/dev/disk/by-label/NROOT" # this is our root partition
export BOOT_BACKUP="/dev/disk/by-label/NBOOT_BCK" # to copy boot disk
 
# Validate
test -e "$BOOT" && echo OK
test -e "$ROOT" && echo OK
test -e "$BOOT_BACKUP" && echo OK
ls -lah $BOOT $ROOT $BOOT_BACKUP

3. Create and Mount sub-volumes

mkdir -p /mnt
mount $ROOT /mnt
btrfs subvolume create /mnt/root
btrfs subvolume create /mnt/home
btrfs subvolume create /mnt/nix
umount /mnt
 
# Mount the root partition
mount -o compress=zstd,subvol=root,ssd $ROOT /mnt
mkdir -p /mnt/{home,nix,boot}
mount $BOOT /mnt/boot # mount the boot partition into efi
mount -o compress=zstd,subvol=home,ssd $ROOT /mnt/home
mount -o compress=zstd,noatime,subvol=nix,ssd $ROOT /mnt/nix
 
mount|grep /mnt/

4. Install NixOS

Typical installation

Generate configuration:

nixos-generate-config --root /mnt

Adjust mount paths (if required)

# /mnt/etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix

Install NixOS

nixos-install
# /mnt/etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix
# /mnt/etc/nixos/configuration.nix

Set user password

$ passwd username

Mount and copy $BOOT to $BOOT_BACKUP

mkdir -p /tmp/boot
mount $BOOT_BACKUP /tmp/boot
cp -r /mnt/boot/efi/* /tmp/boot
umount /tmp/boot

My custom installation

Check this README.md file.

Reinstall bootloader

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Bootloader

mount /dev/[root partition] /mnt
mount /dev/[boot partition] /mnt/boot
 
nixos-enter NIXOS_INSTALL_BOOTLOADER=1 /nix/var/nix/profiles/system/bin/switch-to-configuration boot

TODO

  • open ssh port
  • sshd daemon
  • change hostname
  • set timezone
  • check DHCP on main network interface
  • enable wayland
  • integrate dwl
  • enable ungoogled-chromium
  • set keymap to colemak_dh
  • enable pipewire
  • enable user account
  • enable base packages, nvim, git
  • setup gpg-agent with ssh support
  • fix hardware-configuration.nix
  • swap in ram
  • backup boot partition

tmpfs 1618464 415764 1202700 26% /run/user/1000 mount -o remount,size=2G /run/user/0

References

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