Programmer in California

I’m also on https://leminal.space/u/hallettj

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 7th, 2023

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  • I think you can mount an ISO image under your running system and make changes. I found a couple of guides that might be helpful:

    How to Mount an ISO File on Linux

    Edit and repack .iso bootable image

    I haven’t done this before, but I think you can chroot into the mount directory, and run package manager commands in the mounted image to install another package.

    Or I have an alternative suggestion that might or might not be easier. I’ve been hearing a lot about immutable/atomic distros, and people designing their own images. You could make your own ublue image, for example, with whatever you want on it.

    A promising looking starting point is github:ublue-os/startingpoint. Ignore the “Installation” instructions, and follow the “ISO” instructions instead.

    Or I saw recently an announcement of a new way to build atomic images that is supposed to be easier than ever, BlueBuild





  • Well you’re really feeding my Nix confirmation bias here. I used to use Ansible with my dot files to configure my personal computers to make it easy to get set up on a new machine or server shell account. But it wasn’t great because I would have to remember to update my Ansible config whenever I installed stuff with my OS package manager (and usually I did not remember). Then along came Nix and Home Manager which combined package management and configuration management in exactly the way I wanted. Now my config stays in sync because editing it is how I install stuff.

    Nix with either Home Manager or NixOps checks all of the benefits you listed, except arguably using a “known” programming language. What are you waiting for?





  • Well ok, they both use symlinks but in different ways. I think what I was trying to say is that in NixOS it’s symlinks all the way down.

    IIUC on Fedora Atomic you have an ostree image, and some directories in the image are actually symlinks to the mutable filesystem on /var. Files that are not symlinks to /var (and that are not inside those symlinked directories), are hard links to files in the ostree object store. (Basically like checked-out files in a git repository?)

    On NixOS this is what happens if examine what’s in my path:

    $ which curl
    /run/current-system/sw/bin/curl
    
    $ ls -l /run | grep current-system
    /run/current-system -> /nix/store/p92xzjwwykjj1ak0q6lcq7pr9psjzf6w-nixos-system-yu-23.11.20231231.32f6357
    
    $ ls -l /run/current-system/sw/bin/curl
    /run/current-system/sw/bin/curl -> /nix/store/r304lglsa9i2jy5hpbdz48z3j3x2n4a6-curl-8.4.0-bin/bin/curl
    

    If I select a previous configuration when I boot I would get a different symlink target for /run/current-system. And what makes updates atomic is the last step is to switch the /run/current-system symlink which switches over all installed packages at once.

    I can temporarily load up the version of curl from NixOS Unstable in a shell and see a different result,

    $ nix shell nixpkgs-unstable#curl  # this works because I added nixpkgs-unstable to my flake registry
    $ which curl
    /nix/store/0mjq6w6cx1k9907vxm0k5pk7pm1ifib3-curl-8.4.0-bin/bin/curl  # note the hash is different
    

    I could have a different version curl installed in my user profile than the one installed system-wide. In that case I’d see this:

    $ which curl
    /home/jesse/.nix-profile/bin/curl
    
    $ ls -la /home/jesse | grep .nix-profile
    .nix-profile -> /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/jesse/profile
    
    $ ls -l /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/jesse
    profile -> profile-133-link
    profile-130-link -> /nix/store/ylysfs90018zc9k0p0dg7x6wvzqcq68j-user-environment
    profile-131-link -> /nix/store/9hjiznbaii7a8aa36i8zah4c0xcd8w6d-user-environment
    profile-132-link -> /nix/store/h4kkw1m5q6zdhr6mlwr26n638vdbbm2c-user-environment
    profile-133-link -> /nix/store/jgxhrhqiagvhd6g42d17h4jhfpgxsk3n-user-environment
    

    Basically symlinks upon symlinks everywhere you look. (And environment variables.)

    So I guess at the end everything is symlinks on NixOS, and everything is hard links plus a set of mount paths on Fedora Atomic.







  • hallettj@beehaw.orgtoLinux@lemmy.mlNixOS - edit system files
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    11 months ago

    I did some digging around in the manual, and I tested this option which seems to work:

    security.pam.services.doas.fprintAuth = true;
    

    On my machine that adds this line to /etc/pam.d/doas:

    auth sufficient /nix/store/fq4vbhdk8dqywxirg3wb99zidfss7sbi-fprintd-1.94.2/lib/security/pam_fprintd.so # fprintd (order 11400)
    

    Edit: Note that the NixOS option puts in the full path to pam_fprintd.so. That’s necessary because NixOS doesn’t put so files in search paths.

    Without doing more research I don’t know how to add arbitrary options to pam files in case you run into something that isn’t mapped to a NixOS option yet. The implementation for the pam options is here; there might be something in there that would work.





  • Wayland replaces the older X protocol. It doesn’t have to operate with older protocols. You might be thinking of XWayland which is a proxy that receives X API calls from apps written for X, and translates those to the Wayland API so that those apps can run under Wayland implementations. Window managers can optionally run XWayland, and many do. But as more apps are updated to work natively with Wayland, XWayland becomes less important, and might fade away someday.

    PipeWire replaces PulseAudio (the most popular sound server before PipeWire). Systems running PipeWire often run pipewire-pulse which does basically the same thing that XWayland does - it translates from the PulseAudio API to the PipeWire API. It’s a technically optional, but realistically necessary compatibility layer that may become less relevant over time if apps tend to update to work with PipeWire natively.

    So no, both Wayland and PipeWire are capable of operating independently of other protocols.