Install freezes at 46%

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1

I know this is a common issue and the typical response is to “just wait more” but as far as I can tell it will never complete.

For me it all starts out fine and the instillation chugs along merrily till it hits that 46% mark, then everything in the virtual machine slows down. Opening other apps such as settings takes a really long time, the delay for the pop-up “tool tip” takes a really long time to show, even the clock in the launch bar starts to lag behind my system clock:

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Then 10 minutes later it’s clock advances by a minute:
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I have left it like this for a significant time (like over an hour) but it never seems to complete.

I can kill the virtual machine fine and restart the install but once I hit that 46% mark it all grinds down again. My host system is fine through out his process (in fact I’m writing this on the host environment right now) but I just cant get the install process to complete. Any idea what I can do?

2

Well, after a very long weight it finally failed with a message that gives this URL: https://termbin.com/jpel

But honestly, even the failure was weird: :confused:
There was some kind of message with two buttons and the selection highlight was wildly dancing around the buttons and message body. I tried to take a screen capture but it didn’t seem to work. The clock however did revert to showing the correct time. Any idea what’s going on?

3

If you click on that console button next to the percentage you’ll toggle the logs (at least that’s how GNOME installer works). That should give you an idea of what’s going on.

4

I suspect this might be lack of RAM.
How much did you give the VM?

The nixos-install script gets killed by something, but I haven’t seen a status of 2004 before, so not sure what exactly it means.

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5

Yup, looks like RAM was it.

I had left the ram at the default of 700 odd MB but increasing it to 16GB fixed things.
I also changed a setting to do with the hard disk allocation. I thought I’d set it to be permanently blocked out however seems it was actually set to dynamically claim extra space as it needed.
I also didn’t include a swap space in my first attempts.

So one of these changes enabled it to complete but I suspect as @manveru suggests, it was probably the RAM.

Thank you.
(:

6

It has been this.

Even quite small evaluations exceed the 1GiB mark easily. Also the described behaviour matches a classical OOM coming in.

In general I’d not suggest to use anything less than 2GiB if “local” evaluation is needed.

1 Like
7

Same issue on barebones, stuck at 46% no logs after that point, just slides changing.
preinstalling the entire nix store with packages is absurd, like really man? i tried three times, the third time it went gray, and there was nothing. Why do we have to download each and every package, i know it’s easy to import them in nix config but it doesn’t have to be too much? thought of trying nix after watching a lot of videos, they didn’t even tell us about it :roll_eyes:

8

You only have to download those that are in your system closure.

And if you want to have better control, do the CLI installation.

1 Like
9

Because that isn’t at all what’s happening. If you were actually downloading every package that NixOS has available, I’m pretty sure you’d be downloading many hundreds of gigabytes of software, which obviously isn’t happening. As @NobbZ says, it only installs what’s configured in your configuration.nix, which the GUI installer configures to be relatively minimal with a desktop environment.

1 Like