Fresh manual flake install from Minimal ISO on local PC

Learning point 1

Oh boy! Whilst in hindsight this is extremely simple and easier done with the graphical installer, it was hard to find many complete examples of the manual install process to assure me I would be able to do all I wanted:

• Start with a Flake (to avoid starting non-Flake and switching over without fully understanding how to do it from the beginning)
• Full disk encryption
• Suspend to disk (aka hibernate) given the encryption (a starting point without the random luks key)
• BTRFS (used because I've adopted the very elegant snapshot, send and receive for backups)
• UEFI (with secure boot planned for the future)

I learnt about the chicken and egg: hardware needs to be configured before it can be scanned (by nixos-generate-config) and then used in the Flake (by convention hardware-configuration.nix) to install. Of course what I wanted was to use the definition of the hardware (in Nix) to do the configuration, https://github.com/nix-community/disko does this but I had finished this before I found it.

Learning point 2

What I found awesome is that this command, (after installing NixOS on the target):

nixos-rebuild switch --flake .#dubedary --target-host [email protected]

Rebuilds, from the git repo, with any changed configuration from another machine. Incredible.

Before that, to install NixOS, this is what I 'made':

A Flake - https://github.com/nrbray/nixos-configuration/blob/main/flake.nix

• I included two nixosConfigurations, to test that the one I wanted worked in the presence of another

A Shellscript - https://github.com/nrbray/nixos-configuration/blob/main/ni

Individual steps (shellscript functions) to partition, format and mount the system SSD. Steps A..K done on the target after booting from ISO and having network connection.

• 0.Create_Installation_Media
• 1.Connect_to_wifi_like_this_on_target
• A.Find_block_device_id-link_for_nixos
• B.Export_block_device_for_nixos
• C.Create_partitions_uefi_swap_and_root
• D.Full_root_disk_encryption
• E.Format_partitions_uefi_swap_and_root
• F.BTRFS_Subvolumes_for_root_home_srv
• G.Mounts_for_root_home_srv_uefi
• H.Swap_encryption
• I.Install_git_is_an_alias
• J.Clone_configuration_from_git
• K.Nixos_Install_Flake
• L.Nixos_Install_Legacy_Non_Flake_untested
• Y.Resume_After_B_Then_G
• Z.Go_back
• ___publish_this_file
• ___pull_this_file

I don't know what use this may be to others. It might be useful as an example. Otherwise people might help me (and others ) by pointing out where good examples are that I missed.

Next step modularisation

In the flake.nix we already see modules =[ ... and in configuration.nix imports = [....

modules is just the key used for the initial set of modules, but from there, inside the modules themselves, you bring in others with imports.

The Nix module system provides a parameter, imports, which accepts a list of .nix files and merges all the configuration defined in these files into the current Nix module.

ToDo

1. Update exemplry to have fairly complete starting point
2. Note what needs changing for a specific instance: hostname, boot.initrd.luks.devices.
3. Git clone this repo into local root instance for simple git pull of fixes after install
4. Remove redundancy trust /users/xxx
5. Remove dubedary/desktop
6. Initialise secret root and user passwords on first install "https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/options#opt-users.users._name_.hashedPassword"