Hey, I’ve just installed NixOS on a new computer, and the process was rather painful. I’d like to share my experience, as I feel that installation problems might be underreported due to survivorship bias.
I was installing using graphical live CD. Upon successfully booting from a live cd, I’ve noticed that I don’t have WiFI. This could have been a deal breaker, as I don’t have an ethernet cable, and hauling desktop to my router is not fun.
Luckely, I had a laptop with NixOS, so I was able to google this issue:
The TL;DR is that my broadcom WiFI card needs some proprietary stuff to work, which is not packaged by default. Luckely, I was able to build a custom live-cd with this packaged, which got me my WiFi.
Except that it wasn’t able to see my 5ghz network. I quickly googled out a handful of iwconfig
, iwlist
and iw
commands to diagnose potential issues, but wirelesstools
and iw
are not packaged with a live CD by default. I think this one is an easy thing to fix.
I kinda gave up and just switch my router to use 2.4ghz band, but still.
(
after installation, I diagnosed the problem to probably be related to regulatory domain stuff (cfg80211: failed to load regulatory.db
), I wasn’t able to fix it, but I worked around it well-enough by picking a different 5ghz channel on my router
)
Hope this is helpful feedback!