Tie Fighter Nix Setup

A kiosk computer implementation. Heavily leans on https://github.com/jamesdury/kiosk-on-a-stick

Disk setup

• Download ISO Image from https://nixos.org/download.html#nixos-iso
• Find USB drive to install to with lsblk (note this will probably be /dev/sda or /dev/sdb but make sure it's the USB drive NOT your hard drive unless you want to have a bad day)
• Create USB installation with dd (note: /dev/sdX should be changed to your USB drive from previous step) and nixos.iso should be the path to the nixos iso you downloaded in the first step

  sudo dd if=~/Downloads/nixos.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress conv=fdatasync

• Startup computer from USB drive by using the BIOS (use F2 during boot)
• Use the sudoer user as all of the following requires root sudo -s
• POINT OF NO RETURN - once the next step is complete, you will no longer have a computer
• Run fdisk /dev/diskx where diskx is the hard drive of the computer to partition
  • For a UEFI partition, the following is slighly different to the nixos.wiki guide as it includes a SWAP partition (see the youtube link, below)
    • g (gpt disk label)
    • n
    • 1 (partition number [1 of 128])
    • 2048 first sector
    • +500M last sector (boot sector size)
    • t
    • 1 (EFI System)
    • n (swap partition)
    • 2 (partition number [2 of 128])
    • default (starting sector)
    • +4096M (boot sector size)
    • t
    • 2
    • 19 (Linux Swap)
    • n
    • 3 (partition number [3 of 128])
    • default (fill up partition)
    • default (fill up partition)
    • w (write - this will wipe the disk)
• mkfs.fat /dev/sda1 set first partition as FAT
• mkswap /dev/sda2 set second partition as SWAP
• swapon /dev/sda2 use second partition SWAP
• mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda3 set third partition as ext4 for linux filesystem
• cd go to /
• mount /dev/sda3 /mnt mount linux filesystem on /mnt
• mkdir /mnt/boot make boot partition folder
• mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot mount boot partition (sda1) on boot partition folder
• cd /mnt
• nixos-generate-config --root /mnt generate starting config
• you can check the starting config at /mnt/etc/nixos/configuration.nix
• nixos-install install the configuration.nix start
• set the root password for the system
• reboot restart the system to start using it
• login with root user unless you added a user in configuration.nix
• You may need to fix the permissions on /boot

  chmod -R 700 /boot

Links

• https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_Installation_Guide
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63sSGuclBn0&list=PLuRxZ95-8LY1mlotZMYGYib5sXJRw1RxW&index=1 NOTE this includes a GUI installation AND a manual one at 4:02

Home Manager

sudo nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager
sudo nix-channel --update

Links

• https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/index.xhtml
• https://librephoenix.com/2024-03-14-managing-your-nixos-config-with-git