First nixos installation

AFTER you reinstall your machine - to install the DEV environment, all you have to take with you is /etc/nixos/configuration.nix file, everything is described in it. Amazing!

When previously you would have to check your notes for step by step instruction(similar like linux ubuntu install), to configure your new environment same as it was before, then run different scripts from different places, make sure you got them all.. with nix you will never have that pain again.

• https://github.com/hlissner/dotfiles
• https://github.com/terlar/nix-config

• nixos github repo - https://github.com/nix-community/NixOS-WSL
• nixos manual - https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/

Steps described here:

https://github.com/nix-community/NixOS-WSL

Enter nix-shell to use Emacs(it does not get installed on the system, just TEMPORARILY FROM NIXOS CACHE?). So I can then modify the configuration /etc/nixos/configuration.nix file.

nix-shell -p emacs29

Then let's run emacs in nix-shell(run with sudo)

sudo emacs

Ok now you are in Emacs, but in nix-shell. If we turn off nixos now, when we launch it again, emacs will not be available. Only after you run nix-shell -p emacs. Let's install emacs permanetely. First open the default NixOS configuration file:

sudo emacs /etc/nixos/configuration.nix

Add the following 4 files lines, it will install Emacs globally and permanetely inside of NixOS as well as git(we will need it to clone our config repos). We Install emacs29 because of seq error message that I have faced before:

environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
  emacs29
  git
];

After adding these 4 lines to the config file, C-d to go back to nixos@nixos(out of nix-shell) and BUILD the nixos with the new changes(emacs and git installation).

sudo nixos-rebuild switch

After this finishes running, you should be able to use Emacs and git!

emacs
git status

Some of our config repos are private, so for that we need to authenticate to git first.

First you must do this.

Then one of these:

• authenticate with personal access token
• authenticate with ssh(usually using this at home)
• On work machine, set up ssh method to work repo.
• On work machine for personal repos - use token method.

It consists both emacs and nixos config, we will need both in the next steps.

mkdir ~/GIT
cd ~/GIT
git clone https://github.com/arvydasg/dotfiles

# delete current nixos directory
sudo rm -rf /etc/nixos
# put our config folder instead of the default one
sudo ln -s ~/GIT/dotfiles/nixos/ /etc/nixos

Check if the symlink worked:

ls -la /etc | grep nixos

You should see nixos -> /home/nixos/GIT/dotfiles/nixos/.

If so, then you are done.

We can rebuild NixOS with the settings from our personal configuration in mind.

sudo nixos-rebuild switch

After this is done running, our NixOS installation will be current, as the one described in the configuration file.

Note on Installing other packages

If you want to install a package called "make" for example and nixos says it can not find it when you attempt to install it, then you can do command-not-found make, this command will show each package which exposes that command. Quite useful to know all the versions/types of the package you want to install.

After we have all the "OS" dependencies installed, we can install Emacs dependencies.

# remove .emacs.d dir from ~/ first
cd ~/GIT
ln -s GIT/dotfiles/.emacs.d/ ~/.emacs.d

Check if symlink got created with(while in ~/ dir):

ls -la | grep .emacs.d

Should see something like .emacs.d -> GIT/dotfiles/.emacs.d/.

Do the following step that is described in the emacs config, tangling part - here.

cd ~/.emacs.d
git update-index --assume-unchanged init.el

Try to launch emacs for all the packages to be installed.

Reported it here - https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/1148

Possible fix(questionable) .wslgconfig(as explained in the comments of the issue)