NixOS
by Mithrandir
This is a post suggested by the previous one and by the incidents which caused it. It is possible to be a very personal post but it will also contain some objective pieces of information. Keep this in mind while reading.
The Linux ecosystem is in a complete disarray. Multiple distributions with multiple desktop environments and multiple window managers coming with a large set of programs in a big variety of versions. All of them targeted for a big range of people: from muggles, newbies to expert sysadmins, programmers, technical savvy people. From one point of view, this is perfect: we have Ubuntu and his derivations for one side of the scale and other distributions for the other one (Slackware, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, etc).
There is a problem, though, caused by this diversity: the wide ecosystem doesn’t contain many well-designed, well-thought packages. From simple programs to the mammoths called desktop-environments, there are bugs and errors everywhere.
So much wasted space…
Fortunately, because of the Open Source nature of these applications, users are in control. They can submit bug reports and feature requests, they can switch to another distribution or, in the fortunate cases, they can take to hacking and patching their feature to the project. Thus, each worthy program is updated to suit the needs of users.
Yet, there is another problem: the way these updates arrive back. There are distributions where there is a year gap between a new version of program X becomes available and that update reaches the user. Yes, the advantage is that everything is tested and few bugs remain uncaught. And there are the rolling releases where you can get that novelty as soon as you want at the cost of possible instability.
And those kind of problems are the root of my problems with Linux now. I’m still using it and I will always be using it. Right now I have a temporary Linux Mint installed for it’s rolling release approach but it will not last too much. I found about NixOS and I decided to test it before trying to go once again the Gentoo/Sabayon way.
I’ve decided to test it in a VirtualBox containers but what I got was only 100% CPU usage and a huge memory drain. I tried again using VMware and it seemed to have started:
But x86_64 is not supported
on a x86_64 system and
the error is strange
After a while, I managed to make it run, to have a X environment start:
And it looks rather nice
Yet, there are still problems. After two failed attempts at installing GHC I decided to stop and write this post. I’ll try again, testing this OS during the summer. The plan is to install there everything I use and, if everything works perfectly, to install it on the real machine in October or later.
Until then, I also found an interesting thing in the NixOS thesis:
Open question
Guess the problem is far from being solved. Maybe we’ll come to see the Year of the Linux Desktop…
Hi, welcome to NixOS! We hope you stay :)
There’s a wiki page about GHC and cabal packages. http://nixos.org/wiki/Haskell. It’s a bit complex but hopefully that will help you with your particular problem?
Have you been on freenode’s #nixos channel? That’s probably the best place to go if you have questions, though sometimes no one is around and you may need to ask again later.
Just a warning, x86 is a bit less tested than x86_64. If you can figure out the issue with the virtual machine that might make this smoother. You might want to check http://nixos.org/wiki/InstallingOnVirtualBox.
Hi,
Thanks for all the links, I’ll start reading them.