[Nix-dev] Newbie experiences with NixOS

[Domen Kožar]

Hey Gergö,

So, here goes. First some very minor comments on the website and the manual,
> then more serious issues I ran into when trying (and failing) to install
> some packages I wanted.
>

Thanks for feedback!


> Website and the manual:
>
> - I found it confusing that the manual talks about adding users
> imperatively
>   and imperative package management very early on. Not a problem, I'm just
>   wondering why it does this in the middle of explaining how to set up a
>   nice *declarative* system.
>

Could you file an issue to https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs about this? I
agree that
show the preferred way first is important.

>
> - I found it puzzling that the package channel is to be set imperatively on
>   the command line rather than in the configuration file. This breaks the
>   nice property of the entire configuration being in one or more config
>   files.
>

Channel is handled imperatively, this is a feature request, you could file
it at https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs


> - In the manual, it would be nice to have Appendix B avaiable as a single
>   HTML page separate from the rest of the manual. (Told you these were
>   minor comments.) That would make full-text search for some options
> easier.
>

Manual page split was done during NixOS Sprint in Ljubljana, so sooner or
later
this will take an effect.


> - The installation live CD comes with Konqueror as its web browser. The
>   JavaScript of the package browser at
> http://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html
>   does not work in Konqueror! Did not work for me at least, and there is no
>   fallback to a simpler search page.
>   (I guess I should file this as a bug?)


Yeah, I'd consider using Firefox, file an issue at
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs


> Configuration:
>
> - I haven't gone very deep here, but if I add a user in configuration.nix
>   and do nixos-rebuild, and then modify the configuration to add
> extraGroups
>   (such as wheel) for that user and run nixos-rebuild --switch again, then
>   the extra group setting just seems to be ignored; the user is not added
> to
>   the group.
>   (Would it be OK to file this as a bug against nixpkgs? If not, what
> github
>   project should it be?)
>

staging was just merged into master and it does fix the issue you're
describing.


> - clementine (a music player). The issue here was that by default it
> depends
>   on the unfree libspotify package, but there is an option to install it
>   without this library. However, it didn't work for me:
>
> { config, pkgs, ... }:
> {
>   imports = [ ./hardware-configuration.nix ];
>   boot.loader.grub.enable = true;
>   boot.loader.grub.version = 2;
>   boot.loader.grub.device = "/dev/sda";
>   services.xserver.enable = true;
>   services.xserver.displayManager.kdm.enable = true;
>   services.xserver.desktopManager.kde4.enable = true;
>
>   config.clementine.spotify = false;
>   environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
>     wget vim
>     clementine
>   ];
> }
>
> Trying to build this fails with:
> error: Module `/etc/nixos/configuration.nix' has an unsupported attribute
> `boot'.
>
> This appears to be some sort of internal error in nixos-rebuild, maybe with
> parsing the config file?
>

Try  nixpkgs.config.clementine.spotify = false;


>
> - swt (a Java GUI toolkit, needed by some Java programs). Trying to install
>   this (with a config file as above, only with "swt" in the package list)
>   tries to download
> http://eclipse.ialto.com/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-3.7.2-201202080800/swt-3.7.2-gtk-linux-x86.zip
>   and fails, since that file (and the directory it is supposed to be in)
>   doesn't exist. A file with that name is available from a more official
>   source at
>
> http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-3.7.2-201202080800/swt-3.7.2-gtk-linux-x86.zip
>   I tried remounting the package store read-write and copying this file to
>   the expected place, but the installer didn't pick it up from there, it
>   tried the broken mirror again. Is there a way to inject a manually
>   downloaded file into the build process, or to specify another download
>   URL, short of modifying the Nix expression for the package?
>

Again file the bug. It's possible to do:

$ nix-prefetch-url
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-3.7.2-201202080800/swt-3.7.2-gtk-linux-x86.zip

followed by nixos-rebuild switch


Hope that helps, Domen
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