[Nix-dev] Providing more explicit nix installation instructions

[Florian Friesdorf]

Hi Ellis,

Ellis Whitehead <ellis.whitehead at gmail.com> writes:
> (..)
> Sometimes things have worked out, sometimes they haven't.  Usually,
> the documentation lacks a bit of explicit (sometimes vital) detail.
> Since I'll probably go through this processes occasionally in the
> future, I'd be willing to add my findings to the wiki or the
> documentation, if this would be of interest?

I think this would be great!

> Perhaps to start with: I wanted to install it on a Ubuntu 12.10 system
> from a user account, and noticed something weird:
>
> # Try to install the .deb
> $ sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/nix_1.3-1_amd64.deb
> # There were missing dependencies, so install them as follows:
> $ sudo apt-get update
> $ sudo apt-get install -f
>
> # Now this is the problem:
> $ sudo nix-channel --add http://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-unstable
>
> That created the file $HOME/.nix-channels in my USER home, but with
> owner root.  Obviously not the correct behavior.  The following `sudo
> nix-channel --update` failed (sorry, don't have the error message
> anymore).  Any suggestions for a better way to do this?

sudo -H (see man sudo)

> To get around the problem, I did something like the following:
> $ sudo rm ~/.nix-channels
> $ source /etc/profile.d/nix.sh
>
> The last command created ~/.nix-channels with the proper ownership and
> contents.  I suppose it knew which channel to put in .nix-channels
> because of the first invocation of `nix-channel -add`?  Should I have
> sourced nix.sh before calling `sudo nix-channel` the first time?
>
> Anyhow, after that, the following command *was* successful, and I
> could subsequently install software.
> $ sudo nix-channel --update

For a discussion about that see:
http://www.mail-archive.com/nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl/msg07638.html

regards
florian
-- 
Florian Friesdorf <flo at chaoflow.net>
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