Installing NixOS on the Pinebook Pro
Getting the server up and running
[nixos nixos-22.11 Creating the install media
We can use the ARM ISO files on NixOS.org and if you want a GUI to connect to your network use either the Plasma or GNOME versions. You can also use the Minimal version and you can use the CLI to connect to your network.
Booting from the install media
The next step assumes that you have Tow-Boot installed and if you don’t please review the following steps in their documentation to install it. With the install media connected to the Pinebook Pro, boot it up and wait for the prompt at the bottom left of the screen to press the ESC key for the Boot Menu then select the USB option to boot from.
Once we are in connect to your network using the GUI if you used GNOME/Plasma and if you used the Minimal version use the command below (the command that start with > are from using wpa_cli):
sudo systemctl start wpa_supplicant
wpa_cli
> add_network
> set_network 0 ssid "myhomenetwork"
> set_network 0 psk "mypassword"
> set_network 0 key_mgmt WPA-PSK
> enable_network 0
When successfully connected, you should see a line such as this one
<3>CTRL-EVENT-CONNECTED - Connection to 32:85:ab:ef:24:5c completed [id=0 id_str=]
you can now leave wpa_cli by typing quit.
We can test the connection with this command:
ping -c 3 google.com
Off the main road
From here we will close the installer as it did not work for me with an error message about installing the systemd-boot loader so I used my own installer which is below:
https://gitlab.com/ahoneybun/nyxi-installer/-/blob/main-pbp/README.md
be sure to use the main-pbp branch and you may want to edit the configuration.nix file as I have my hashed password in there with my set username, you can use the steps in the README to create your own hashed password. If not you set the root password at the end of the installation which can be used to change the password and/or create a new user either way, this is the configuration.nix that I use for the Pinebook Pro:
https://gitlab.com/ahoneybun/nix-configs/-/blob/main/systems/pinebook-pro.nix
Once the installation is done (after we set the root password) we can reboot, please note that the boot time is rather long and the display might flicker a bit.