3 ms·

I currently use NixOS for a personal server (running on a Kimsufi Atom box at €10.20 a month). It's seriously awesome; I have my full operating system defined i

I currently use NixOS for a personal server (running on a Kimsufi Atom box at €10.20 a month). It's seriously awesome; I have my full operating system defined in a config file which can be versioned and backed up. I can write extra packages and custom services easily, as well, as part of my configuration. It even has its own declarative cloud management tool, NixOps. One issue is that at present, the system is very much rolling release with snapshots every 6 months called "releases". Unfortunately, there's not currently a good release management process; 14.04 was essentially managed by asking everyone not to merge anything major in the month before, then a week(?) of testing on a separate branch. If there's anyone with release management experience, I'm sure they'd appreciate some help. The IRC channel on Freenode is extremely friendly, for anyone who has difficulty setting it up. Someone else on here mentioned Guix; Guix is essentially Nix with a different language for defining packages. Nix's language is purely functional and lazy, but actually really simple; the nixpkgs library defines enough helpers that the vast majority of use of the language looks like a slightly more complex version of JSON.

Seldaek 13y ago
Would you mind sharing how you set it up on a Kimsufi/OVH machine? All infos I have found were quite outdated and I haven't had enough time to dig into it myself yet. I think it would be great if someone would document this.
- vertex-four 13y ago
  I could write it up on the wiki, but I've forgotten the finer details at this point. Basically, I followed the Linode instructions, using the Kimsufi rescue disk as a base. The problems that I ran into were that I had problems with the latest Nix tarball, so I used the latest release of Nix at the time instead[0] (probably a good idea anyway), and also that I needed to set up separate / and /boot partitions, as Nix wouldn't install when everything was on / for some reason (I think the Gentoo forums claim there's some issue with GRUB2 and ext4). Not having KVM access is hell when you're trying to figure out why your system won't boot, btw. [0] http://hydra.nixos.org/build/6695701 http://hydra.nixos.org/build/6695701
Lethalman 13y ago
Hi. I'd like to run NixOS on kimsufi as well. Do the servers work well? Is the cpu what they say on the page? Do they provide kvm?

Seldaek 13y ago

Would you mind sharing how you set it up on a Kimsufi/OVH machine? All infos I have found were quite outdated and I haven't had enough time to dig into it myself yet. I think it would be great if someone would document this.

vertex-four 13y ago
I could write it up on the wiki, but I've forgotten the finer details at this point. Basically, I followed the Linode instructions, using the Kimsufi rescue disk as a base. The problems that I ran into were that I had problems with the latest Nix tarball, so I used the latest release of Nix at the time instead[0] (probably a good idea anyway), and also that I needed to set up separate / and /boot partitions, as Nix wouldn't install when everything was on / for some reason (I think the Gentoo forums claim there's some issue with GRUB2 and ext4). Not having KVM access is hell when you're trying to figure out why your system won't boot, btw. [0] http://hydra.nixos.org/build/6695701 http://hydra.nixos.org/build/6695701

Lethalman 13y ago

Hi. I'd like to run NixOS on kimsufi as well. Do the servers work well? Is the cpu what they say on the page? Do they provide kvm?