NixOS Installation

Pre-Installation Guide

This guide assumes that you have followed the pre-installation guide.

1. Partition your disk using cfdisk or the tool of your preference, initialize the partitions with the mkfs command of the filesystem you want (mkswap is for swap) and mount them under /mnt.

   Note: You might want to leave a little part of your disk as a FAT32 partition to be able to transfer files easily between MacOS and Linux.

2. To connect to internet, you should load the firmware with these commands first:

   sudo mkdir -p /lib/firmware/brcm
   sudo cp /mnt/boot/firmware/* /lib/firmware/brcm
   sudo modprobe -r brcmfmac && sudo modprobe brcmfmac
   

   Then run systemctl start wpa_supplicant and then connect to internet using wpa_cli. When running the commands, don't forget to change /mnt/boot to the place you mounted your ESP at (for example /mnt/boot/efi).

3. Generate your configuration using sudo nixos-generate-config --root /mnt.

4. Edit /mnt/etc/nixos/configuration.nix:

   • Add "${builtins.fetchGit { url = "https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware.git"; }}/apple/t2" to imports.

   • Copy the WiFi/Bluetooth firmware to /mnt/etc/nixos/firmware/brcm and add this snippet to your configuration.nix:

     hardware.firmware = [
       (pkgs.stdenvNoCC.mkDerivation {
         name = "brcm-firmware";
     
         buildCommand = ''
           dir="$out/lib/firmware"
           mkdir -p "$dir"
           cp -r ${./files/firmware}/* "$dir"
         '';
       })
     ];
     

   • Add a bootloader, systemd-boot works quite well. If you want to use GRUB, don't forget to set boot.grub.efiInstallAsRemovable, boot.grub.efiSupport to true and boot.grub.device to "nodev".

   • Run sudo nixos-install.

And the installation is complete! Note that you should probably transition to a more structured configuration using flakes, that is omitted here for brevity.