First Installation stuck/hang for Thinkpad X1 Carbon gen 9

Help
1

Hi Community!

So I was trying to install NixOS on Thinkpad X1 Carbon gen 9. I inserted the USB drive (with 20.09) and booted from it, some NixOS stuff showed up on the screen, basically detecting hardware and stuff, but then it hang there. This would be the “start the installation GUI using systemctl start display-manager” step. Although for me, when using the Gnome ISO image, nothing was showing except an empty cursor and it apparently got stuck.

I did try the KDE plasma ISO image and it did get me into the tty1 shell. I did a systemctl start display-manager but nothing happened. I tried systemctl status display-manager and saw it was actively running but nothing happened.

Any ideas why this happened and how to solve it? I successfully installed NixOS on my older Dell XPS 9560 and have been happily using it for more than a week (yeah I’m new to NixOS) but would like to make this work on my Thinkpad. Thanks in advance!

2

Update: I managed to at least get an error message, when booting with Plasma:

$ systemctl start display-manager
hdaudio hdaudioC0D2: Unable to bind the codec
3

If that’s too new, you might need a newer kernel than whatever the ISO have.

My 2 cents: Either install without GUI or create a custom installation media with latest kernel.