Talk: Nix Installation Guide

I have just added a clarifying header that refers back to more official documentation here, because I had a first-time user follow the instructions on this page to install Nix.

I think it's a better idea to first follow the instructions in the official docs and resort to this wiki to fill the gaps.

IMO Nix has a bit of a problem with documentation being so fragmented and I think linking relevant official sources is a good measure to take for improving that situation.

Let me know what you think about this.

txomon 2024-04-15

Can anyone explain better how to achieve a root-less installation method? I haven't been able to use "nix 2.0" installation method or anything similar, as nix installer doesn't seem to support it.

I have started to use nix-portable, but that doesn't appear here, although deprecated/unmaintained nix-user-chroot seems to be present.

buck 2024-11-08

I was able to follow the "nix 2.0" installation method on a Debian trixie/sid (testing) host with the nix-bin package installed by running

nix run --store ~/my-nix nixpkgs#bashInteractive

It looked just like any other bash prompt, so i had to echo $BASH_VERSION to be sure it differed from the $BASH_VERSION of another shell started up outside nix, and i did an `ls -ld /proc/$$/exe` and noted that the path it pointed to in /nix/store didn't exist in /nix/store outside the shell (i.e., in the default system mount namespace. In truth, I had to delete the existing path from the system /nix/store, since it had already been installed, and rerun to make sure it was really pointing to a path in ~/my-nix/nix/store, and that the corresponding path in /nix/store didn't actually exist anymore).

In case that helps. Hope it's not outright misleading, as I am just beginning dabbling with nix myself.

alisterh 2024-08-06

This page is confusing - it is on the nixos wiki, and the nixos links in the first section (the "clarifying header" mentioned above) suggest it should be about installing nixos, but is it, or is it about installing the nix package manager on other distros? The `apt` command down in the WSL1 section suggests it is about installing on other distros.

I found my way here because I want to run nixos in WSL1 (not because I have an older Windows version, but because access to the Windows filesystem is much faster in WSL1). So I guess I need to start by running it in WSL2, and either find the nixos way to enable QEMU and binfmt-support, or to install a 64bit bootstrap (which seems an inherently better solution), then convert to WSL.