Hello,
I’m new to NixOS (and seriously loving it). I’m facing an issue where my ttys (eg from Ctrl+Alt+f1) are unable to properly print unicode characters. I found a solution and am making this post because (1) I’m not sure if my solution is proper; and (2) for the benefit of future Googlers.
My solution was to make the following changes to configuration.nix:
environment.interactiveShellInit = ''
grep -q /dev/tty <(tty) && exec fbterm
'';
security.wrappers.fbterm = {
setuid = true;
owner = "root";
group = "root";
source = "${pkgs.fbterm}/bin/fbterm";
};
This works, but I have some concerns. First, I wonder if setting uid on fbterm like this is a security risk. Some cursory testing suggests that it’s not, but I’m not confident. Second, I wonder if grep -q /dev/tty <(tty) && exec fbterm is sufficiently shell-independent to be used in interactiveShellInit. It seems to work on sh, which suggests yes. Finally, I wonder if there’s a better way to place the shell code than interactiveShellInit (or if there’s a better way to solve this problem altogether).
(nb. I recognize that grep and tty are undocumented dependencies for this, but I figure it’s reasonable to assume that a NixOS system has them in PATH)
Any feedback is appreciated!