nixpkgs/README
Armijn Hemel 07c3eefe27 add instruction to add symlink to nixpkgs
svn path=/nixos/trunk/; revision=7361
2006-12-18 00:12:45 +00:00

84 lines
2.2 KiB
Plaintext

*** Building the installation CD ***
- Make sure that you have a very recent Nix.
- Pull from the Nixpkgs channel to speed up building.
- Check out https://svn.cs.uu.nl:12443/repos/trace/nixos/trunk/.
- make a symbolic link called "pkgs" to the location of Nixpkgs
- Build the ISO image:
$ nix-build instances/rescue-cd.nix -A rescueCD
This gives you an image in result/iso/nixos.iso.
- Burn the ISO image or attach it to a CD-ROM drive in VMware.
*** Installation ***
- Boot from the CD.
- The CD contains a pretty complete NixOS installation. When it's
finished booting, it should have detected most of your hardware and
brought up networking (check ifconfig). Networking is necessary for
the installer. It's best if you have a DHCP server on your
network. Otherwise configure manually.
- Login as "root", empty password.
- The NixOS installer doesn't do any partitioning or formatting yet,
so you need to that yourself. Use "fdisk" and "e2fsck".
- Unpack the NixOS and Nixpkgs sources:
$ tar xf /nixos.tar.bz2
$ tar xf /nixpkgs.tar.bz2
$ ln -s nixpkgs-*/pkgs .
(TODO: do this automatically.)
- The installation is declarative; you need to make a description of
the configuration that is to be built and activated. The
configuration is specified in a Nix expression. See
instances/examples for example machine configurations. You can copy
and edit one of those (e.g., instances/examples/basic.nix to
my-config.nix). See configuration/options.nix for available
configuration settings. The text editor "nano" is available.
In particular you need to specify boot.rootDevice and
boot.grubDevice for the devices where the OS and Grub are to be
installed, respectively.
- Do the installation:
$ nixos-installer.sh /dev/TARGET . my-config.nix
where TARGET matched boot.rootDevice in your configuration. (TODO:
this should be extracted automatically.)
- If everything went well:
$ reboot
You should now be able to boot into the installed NixOS.
*** Troubleshooting ***
To get a Stage 1 shell:
- Add "debug1" to the kernel command line.
To switch to maintenance mode:
$ shutdown now
To get out of maintenance mode:
$ initctl emit startup