Nix with its ecosystem is amazing tooling and the library functions in nixpkgs provide great builders to package certain programs, scripts, and stuff. But in this jungle of options, it’s also sometimes not clear which option is the best or most pragmatic solution. In this blog post, I’m going to Read more…
For various reasons, such as OS development, it is convenient to quickly start up an instance of QEMU or Cloud Hypervisor with a custom kernel and initrd. However, often the major struggle is to get some kernel and some initrd, i.e., the boot items, quickly and easily. Scope Foremost, this Read more…
nixos-rebuild –target-host <user@host> is a powerful tool to remotely deploy a NixOS configuration. However, there are scenarios where you can’t reach a machine directly but need an SSH jump host. Suppose you want to deploy to the host 192.168.124.42, which is only reachable from the host ssh-gate. Then your nixos-rebuild Read more…
Recently, I’ve bought a TP-Link Archer TX20U Nano WiFi USB dongle (vendor website) for my desktop PC. The driver for Windows is provided by the stick itself, as it exposes a storage volume with the Windows driver on it. On Linux, the Windows driver doesn’t work, of course. However, with Read more…
Although Nix flakes are still marked as unstable, they became the de facto standard for managing reproducible NixOS system configurations. Regarding NixOS system configurations, the major benefit of flakes is that they bundle nixpkgs (and possibly further dependencies) along with the configuration files. The nixpkgs version and the configuration files Read more…
In an earlier post, I talked about how you can build an out-of-tree Linux kernel module in a Nix derivation, i.e., package it in Nix. However, for quick prototyping, sometimes you want to just enter $ make in your shell, for example to check if everything compiles. Out-of-tree module projects Read more…