Need help installing custom driver

So I install nixos for the first time yesterday, and I’m really enjoying it so far. though I’ve not yet fully mimicked my old setup, I really enjoy how stable everything is.

However, I current have one non-negotiable package that I need but haven’t been able to install, and that’s the digimend drivers. I have a fairly new tablet, and the default drivers in the kernel are not enough to run it, so I need to build the latest source from github. I have the method down to a science on other distros, but I’m not sure how to do so on this distro. When running make in the directory, I get the following:

make -C /lib/modules/5.4.33/build M=/home/fateace/src/digimend-kernel-drivers modules
make[1]: *** /lib/modules/5.4.33/build: No such file or directory.  Stop.
make: *** [Makefile:22: modules] Error 2

And that’s not even getting to the installation part.

I’ve noticed that there are digimend driver packages in the unstable branch, but adding them to my configuration.nix package doesn’t seem to do anything.

Is there anyway I can get these drivers installed into the kernel? I noticed off hand in the manual there was a note about making a custom kernel. Would it have something to do with that?

My system is currently using the default kernel (5.4 I believe). I don’t know if I have the headers installed, couldn’t find a package for them.

You’ll want to do this in configuration.nix, not with a manual build. Look through man configuration.nix for options to enable digimend properly (or look here: NixOS Search - Loading...). Simply adding the package to systemPackages isn’t enough because it doesn’t install kernel modules; just user space stuff. The boot.extraModulePackages is how the built-in option adds the kernel module.

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With that my kernel is working! Thanks for your help!