1) Select "Deploy a Distribution" from the linode dashboard [1], and select Distribution "Debian 5.0 64bit" (the smallest disk requirement), Deployment Disk Size 384MB, Swap Disk the size you want for your final NixOS swap space (this volume can be shared as only one OS will be booted at a time). This Debian 5.0 image be used to bootstrap NixOS, and also as a rescue medium in the future. Note that you can not use "Finnix" if you want to use NixOS x86_64, as linode does't support finnix64, so you can't run 64-bit NixOS binaries from Finnix. And we can't think of any reason you'd want to use NixOS i686 on a VPS. 2) Create a disk image (partition) for NixOS to be installed on to via the linode dashboard [2] "Create a new Disk Image" option. 3) Edit the "My Debian 5.0 64bit Profile" to have your NixOS disk be xvdc, and save the profile 4) boot into "My Debian 5.0 64bit Profile", connect to it via linshell, and mount xvdc 5) The x86_64 bootstrap archive can be downloaded from 6) Install following the archive installation README, which is named "README-BOOTSTRAP-NIXOS". (Except that doesn't really work unless you already have a lot of NixOS clue, so doing step-by-step below, and will then try to write up replacement for README-BOOTSTRAP-NIXOS) 6.1) Force creating a init script and get networking options from the configuration profile editing page:
mkdir /mnt/etc/nixos
cat > /mnt/etc/nixos/configuration.nix << EOF
{
boot.loader.initScript.enable = true;
}
EOF
6.2) Get the NixOS Sources via SVN aptitude install subversion [... subversion and deps installed in debian install/rescue image ...] bash /mnt/nix/store/nixos-prepare-install checkout-sources [... lots of stuff checked out ...] 6.3) Prepare the install from the SVN sources bash /mnt/nix/store/nixos-prepare-install copy-nix 6.4) TODO 7) Create a configuration profile assigning your NixOS disk image to /dev/xvda (/sbin/init will be started). Choose a kernel, and also assign swapspace as xvdb. 8) Reboot. Have fun. |