Liminix (a Nix-based system for consumer wifi routers) is 1.0

Announcements
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(I hope Announcements is an OK place to post this - please move if not)

Liminix is a project to create a Nix-based system for configuring consumer wifi routers, of the kind that OpenWrt or DD-WRT or Gargoyle or Tomato run on. It’s not NixOS-on-your-router: it’s aimed at devices that are underpowered for the full NixOS experience. It uses busybox tools, musl instead of GNU libc, and s6-rc instead of systemd.

Liminix is nowhere near ready for general use, but I do now have one device which is running it in a “domestic wifi router” configuration (two band wireless, wired lan, upstream via PPPoE) so this seems an opportune time to start talking about it. I’m happy to announce that it’s been granted funding from the NLnet NGI0 Entrust initiative so progress should be happening over the next few months.

(If you’ve been doing Nix for more than a few years you might remember “NixWRT”. This is similar goals, same author, different name, hopefully better execution)

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How can I get an email when there’s a new release, please?

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Congrats on the funding! This is great news :relaxed:

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I don’t have mailing lists set up yet, but if you watch this thread (I think discourse has email notifications) I’ll be sure to update it as and when anything amazing happens

If you’re not wedded to email as a nitification mechanism you could use an RSS feed reader to subscribe to Liminix (which strictly speaking seems to be Atom, but I’d expect any vaguely modern feed reader to do both)

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… and if you’re interested in seeing it work but not quite interested enough in it to go out and buy a sacrificial router to partially dismember, I made a video

Apologies for the production values :slight_smile:

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Bumping this after only another two years since the previous post to say that Liminix has been seeing regular updates (more regular than this thread has seen anyway :slight_smile: ) and I’ve taken the decision to call it 1.0. It now supports

  • a writable filesystem, such that you can now update from one configuration.nix to another without reflashing the whole system (note this is dependent on your device having enough flash to make it worthwhile)
  • more MIPS devices
  • some ARM devices such as the Turris Omnia and the Belkin RT3200
  • modules based on the nixos module system (although not the actual nixos modules)
  • failover services
  • configuration from an external source of secrets (e.g it can fetch a file over HTTPS that you keep in sops)

… and more that I can’t remember off the top of my head. Web site is at https://www.liminix.org/ , there are some very infrequently used mailing lists and a slightly more regularly used IRC channel which welcomes your questions

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