I am trying to switch to NixOS from Fedora 38. I have a HP laptop with a Realtek network card. The required driver is rtw89. While it seems NixOS (stable) has this (from running find / | grep rtw89), nothing appears when trying to connect to the internet. (The only connection that appears after running ip address is lo (loopback)).
I tried using the unstable branch, but (unlike when I used Fedora 38 while it was in beta) it did not fix the problem.
I can’t help with the Wi-Fi, but i have found unstable more practical with less issues overall than stable. That said, i have had a number of issues as 23.05 became stable which i haven’t had the chance to resolve yet - mainly due to vacation with very little Internet access
Yes. I start the NixOS live environment, start Konsole, and run:
sudo su
nixos-generate-configuration
nixos-rebuild edit
Then, a small nix config file shows (one line of actual configuration!) I insert the boot.kernelModules = [ "rtw89" ] line into the configuration, and run nixos-rebuild switch. Following that, I get slammed with many many network errors (But nothing that prevents the configuration from being built I think.) I log out, log back in, and nothing changed. Still can’t install or use the internet on the NixOS live environment. I think it might have something to do with not being able to have data persist through restarts in live enviornments, but I can’t change that.
I’m not sure whether the live system includes this kernel module.
Try find /nix/store -name "*rtw89*.ko" to locate it and use sudo insmod with the path you found.