[Nix-dev] building live DVD?

[Marc Weber]

On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 02:35:46PM +0100, Felix Breuer wrote:
>  Okay, with the help of Michael and Marc, I was able to get live-dvd.nix to 
>  build. The next step was to try live-dvd-X.nix. Here I needed to fix two 
>  things:
> 
>  1) Disable gw6c service. Otherwise building fails as the gw6c derivation 
>  complains that the paths
> >       private = "/var/elliptic-keys/private";
> >       public = /var/elliptic-keys/private;
>  are missing. Which of course they are, as gw6c does not run on my build 
>  system.
> 
>  2) Update SHA256 sum of flashplayer 10. The tarball distributed by Adobe 
>  seems to have changed.
> 
>  Diffs of these two changes are attached. After these two changes, I could 
>  build live-dvd-X.nix sucessfully.
> 
> 
> 
>  Now I would like to run X from withing the live DVD. This I did not manage 
>  yet. I guess because I do not comprehend nix yet. I booted nixos 
>  successfully inside VirtualBox, selecting Rescue X with vesa at the grub 
>  prompt. The system started just fine and I could login as root.
> 
>  After that, I tried something as naive as "startx" resulting in "command not 
>  found".
:-) I'm glad you've asked. You're not alone:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.nixos/1002/match=newcomer
( -> "Q: How to start Xorg ?")

If you really want to start X from console manually you should have a
a look at xlaunch or use this script:
It extracts teh important information form the /etc/event.d/xserver file
and writes a launch script with the same setup contents to /tmp/script2.
I'm using it currently to trouble shoot xorg-git so that I can keep my
normal X session running. (You can do this yourself. Just follow the
slim configuration file which contains the X org setup settings)

  #!/bin/sh

  SLIM_CONFIG="$(sed -n 's at .*SLIM_CFGFILE=\(/.*\)@\1 at p'
  /etc/event.d/xserver)"
  echo
  echo "SLIM_CONFIG is $SLIM_CONFIG"

  xserver_arguments="$(sed -n 's at .*xserver_arguments \(.*\)@\1 at p'
  "$SLIM_CONFIG" | sed -e 's/vt7/vt9/' -e 's/:0/:9/' -e
  's@/var/log/X.[0123456789].log@/var/log/X-test.log@'  )"
  echo
  echo "xserver_arguments: $xserver_arguments"

  default_xserver="$(sed -n 's at .*default_xserver \(.*\)@\1 at p'
  "$SLIM_CONFIG")"
  echo
  echo "default_xserver: $default_xserver"

  cat > /tmp/script2 << EOF
  #/bin/sh
  $default_xserver $xserver_arguments
  EOF
  chmod +x /tmp/script2

Sincerly
Marc Weber