Have you tried a 23.11 iso? You can build one from nixpkgs or use GitHub - nix-community/nixos-generators: Collection of image builders [maintainer=@Lassulus]
Yes, this one just boots into the installer with no problems. It is actually the one that i installed my current installation from
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Definitely sounds like a bug. Hard to say more without physical access to the system. At the very least let us know what hardware you have. Next step I would do is build a minimal, bootable USB with systemd initrd turned on (so you can actually see the error messages!)
As i said in the original post, i am using vmware workstation, so a virtual machine.
Ah, sorry I missed that. Probably, this is just the iso getting confused about what virtual device to interact with (i.e serial vs graphical device)
No worries. Not really though, because plymouth is starting for the installer and then just freezes the system. I also couldn’t get to the tty in the installer iso.
I am however getting a moving coursor on my upgraded installation and i am also getting into the tty. Sadly i can’t really find anything in the logs that would actually tell me, why this is happening.
Because that bug is only relevant if you’re using systemd initrd, which is not enabled by default. Not to mention the other highly specific circumstances required for it. Unless you have systemd initrd, GDM auto-login, and plymouth all enabled, that bug is not relevant to you. Also, the bug was present in 23.11, so if your issue started after updating, it’s not that bug. Also the system freezing is not the symptom of that bug.
@ElvishJerricco
thank you for your input. You are right, I missed the part where it is specific to systemd initrd.
All the other points do apply to the graphical gnome installer.
interestingly enough the 24.11 pre version does correctly start
Hey @nineephe
I have the same issue, but I am not running it on a VM. Booting from the USB with nixos-gnome-24.05.2150.89c49874fb15-x86_64-linux.iso works until the display manager startup step. The boot logs stay on the screen and after some time disappear. Not possible to start a tty.
Do you by chance use an NVIDIA graphics card? It does not work on my Nvidia box, but running the live image on my laptop without a gcard works.
I do use an Nvidia card. But shouldn’t the VM abstract that away? The vm only reports it as the VMware default card.
I would have to investigate that more with a VM on my laptop.
@Torwalt I checked on my laptop and the desktop environment loads there no problem. However I can’t install it to test further as the installer just crashes when I start to type my full name like some other post described.
So 24.05 just doesn’t work and this will rule out nixos for me for the foreseeable future. I really liked the concept but I also need stability
@nineephe
Afaik as long as you dont run the VM on some other host than your machine, the hardware is not abstracted away, only resources and the environment is sandboxed.
I did not test the installer completely on my laptop, but I had very few troubles on 24.05 when I installed 23.11 some months ago and upgraded to 24.05.
@Torwalt I see, that makes sense but that also means that it will not work for my usecase at all
No worries
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I am having this issue aswell. Using an Nvidia RTX 3090 with an Intel 9900k. Can confirm that the 23.11 iso works just fine and only 24.05 is the problem. Can also confirm that if I put a Radeon 6800XT into the system the display manager comes up without any issue. Does anyone know what could be causing this?
Another bit of troubleshooting that I did was to enable the iGPU, plug my display into that and boot the 24.05 iso but that also didn’t resolve this.
Could we also mark this unresolved as there doesn’t appear to actually be a solution for this yet @nineephe
I’ve tried a few other things. It looks like the KDE iso is also affected, so this isn’t just limited to gnome. Further, this only seems to be affecting newer Nvidia GPUs as the 1080ti system that I put the gnome iso in worked launched the DE without any issue. Seems like this is something to do with the Nvidia specific configuration, turing or later?
You’re thinking of containers. Virtualization typically creates a virtual graphics output for the VM. How this is implemented depends on the virtualization host software used, but in general, nvidia-specific issues are unlikely unless you’re doing VFIO passthrough.
@nineephe The ISO’s plymouth doesn’t work very well in VMs, in my experience. I’m not sure why. But often, the screen just hangs for a good while before the system boots anyway. Are you sure the system is actually crashing? Or if you wait a few minutes does it eventually make it to a desktop? Also, you can press e in the ISO’s boot menu to edit the kernel params, and try removing splash or adding plymouth.enable=0 to disable plymouth.
On bare metal though, yes, nvidia is sometimes problematic. @Ai-Elias Have you tried the nomodeset boot option in the installer?
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@ElvishJerricco I am quite sure that it actually panics, as the caps lock light blinks both in the VM and also when I tried it on my bare Metal, however I did not get any logs out of it because there is no persistence in the installer. I will try with Plymouth disabled and report back
@ElvishJerricco i tried now with removing splash and my previous installation took the whole vmware hypervisor with it.
I installed nixos 24.05 successfully with no graphics acceleration and it is working. As soon as i activate it, it will hang completely on each boot
this is with plymouth disabled