this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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We need a little more info than that.
Like, what OS? What other tools? Why does it need to be custom, can't you just install the tools on the installed system? Why do you need a live session/ISO, if you plan on having it installed on persistant storage anyway?
I'm not particular about the distro, I just want something stable so there I don't have to re-make it, that supports Wayland. As for why I want it as an iso, portability, I wanna be able to take it and flash it at will. As for the tools, partitioning tools vscode and dotnet is all I need
NixOS might be a particularly elegant solution to make that image reproducible and you could even do version control to get it just right.
I'd love to use NixOS, but it's way too complicated for me, and the documentation sucks...
I hear ya. I recommend forking a setup and modding it slowly in a VM. That way, you can dial it in progressively.
I understand that it’s a sea change and documentation isn’t great but I’d posit that there are plenty of great setups on GitHub that will get you 99% of the way toward a working config. Whatever you decide, I hope you realize I’m not trying to pressure you. I just really love it once I got used to it’s way of working, coming from a more standard FHS Kubuntu config where I had to have weird scripts to mount discs on fstab on boot to do pretty standard stuff.
I have a VM part of my config (before I started putting anything that would even remotely expose good vectors of attack at all in an encrypted secure folder) that would work great and has all the fancy stuff like flakes, content-addressed derivations, and home-manager enabled by default.
Once a config works in NixOS, it is nearly impossible to break. That’s the thing I like about NixOS: once I get something working, it’s pretty much guaranteed to stay working and is 100% guaranteed to stay working if you never update the flake. I like to make progress and have that progress stick with me even when I refactor everything around it..and that certainly is the power of Nix/NixOS.
ok, but is there a way to turn the system I get out of configuring nix into a live iso easily?
Absolutely. I think there are even some tutorials out there.
https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Creating_a_NixOS_live_CD
https://nix.dev/tutorials/nixos/building-bootable-iso-image
Maybe you could work in some code from: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Impermanence to really keep it wiping almost everything on reboot.
Once you arrive at something, please share it to help the mindshare.
Feel free to look at my config at https://github.com/harryprayiv/nix-config (I added a branch for liveISO that I worked on for a bit).
If you git clone then switch to that branch, you could use the command ./switch_TUI to access the little TUI I made just now to walk you through the evaluation of your iso config under option 2 in the TUI to evaluate (kind of my way to evaluate and dry run until nix stops giving warnings) home manager config and option 15 for the evaluation of the system part of the config (all of the relevant files for this live inside of /system/machine/liveIso and I just connected them in my top-level flake). You’d just have to change filesystem mounts and other hardware related stuff…maybe comment things out until it asks for them then start to open things up again. That’s the beauty of laziness, IMO.
This seems like a worthy endeavor so I worked on it a bit.
Edit: heavily edited to include stuff that I made for you.
Thanks! I'll take a better look at it and nixos (again) when I have time, I like how honest you are about text editors lol. Looks incredibly complicated at a 1st glance
the liveIso branch is SIGNIFICANTLY pared down for your consumption though admittedly I was unable to get the live iso part working.
I got a working, good, lightweight, kickass xmonad home-manager config into the system/machine/liveISO folder just for you.