[Nix-dev] Problems getting started with nix

[Maarten Derickx]

Thanks, that seemed to help. It's now running the installing. I was
quite suprised by the memory footprint of nix when executing `nix-env
-i hello`. It actually takes up over 600MB of ram at it's peak :(.
Maybe this is related to the step 6 in the chapter  2. Quick Start.
Where it sais "This should download pre-built packages; it should not
build them locally (if it does, something went wrong)."

And the output of the command in step 6 is very huge and contains a
lot of stuff like:

gcc -c  -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -DSHELL  -I. -I../.. -I../.. -I../../include
-I../../lib -DMACOSX -g -O2 glob.c
rm -f strmatch.o
gcc -c  -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -DSHELL  -I. -I../.. -I../.. -I../../include
-I../../lib -DMACOSX -g -O2 strmatch.c
rm -f smatch.o
gcc -c  -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -DSHELL  -I. -I../.. -I../.. -I../../include
-I../../lib -DMACOSX -g -O2 smatch.c
rm -f xmbsrtowcs.o

and similar lines indicating that it is actually building stuff
locally. So step 6 is also failing since it should not build but just
download stuff.

Note that I did not change the nix store location so this cannot be
the cause of stuff getting rebuild again. Maybe it's because there are
no prebuilt binary's for my system? I have OS X 10.6.8 and my
processor is an Intel Core 2 duo hence 64 bit.

I hope you will update the quick start chapter with the stuff learned
from my attempt to install stuff since I think it's quite essential
that just blindly following the quickstart just works if you want
other people to use your project.

On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 1:04 PM, Sander van der Burg - EWI
<S.vanderBurg at tudelft.nl> wrote:
> Probably you have installed Nix as root and you're trying to update the channel as a non-privileged user.
>
> The simplest solution is probably by changing the permissions of the /nix directory to your own user account, e.g.:
>
> chown -R myuser:mygroup /nix
>
> Then everything should work fine!
>
> Another solution is by running the nix daemon (which allows secure sharing of Nix components between arbitrary users on a single system), but this isn't very well documented how to do this on regular Linux distributions.
> ________________________________________
> From: nix-dev-bounces at lists.science.uu.nl [nix-dev-bounces at lists.science.uu.nl] on behalf of Maarten Derickx [m.derickx.student at gmail.com]
> Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2011 12:40 AM
> To: nix-dev at lists.science.uu.nl
> Subject: [Nix-dev] Problems getting started with nix
>
> Dear nix developers,
>
> After reading http://fixingscientificsoftwaredistribution.blogspot.com/
> (a blog on wich some people try to get ideas and experiences for a new
> scientific software distribution possibly based on nix) I got
> interested in what nix really was so I tried to install and run it as
> described on:
>
>
> http://hydra.nixos.org/build/565033/download/1/manual/#chap-quick-start
>
> But doing that I got some errors. I tried to work around them but did
> not succeed in that.
> I pasted relevant parts of the terminal session on:
>
> http://pastebin.com/xeSYBHyn
>
>
> Not I got around the problems of `nix-channel --update` by doing `sudo
> nix-channel --update` but later on I get similar acces problems.
>
> I installed nix as root just as suggested in the quick start. I did
> not supply the --prefix and --with-store-dir=path to make install. And
> I'm running OS X 10.6.8 and the nix version is nix-0.16
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Maarten Derickx
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