Noon van der Silk - Installing NixOS with the latest kernel

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2025-01-08 10:00:36

One potential reason for the failure could be that your new computer requires the latest linux kernelPackages in order to work; i.e. something like:

The most important fact here is that you select the calamares variant of the installation iso’s. Calamares is the graphical installer. (Note: If you wanted the minimal installer, you can actually download that from the nixos hydra instance directly: nixos.iso_minimal_new_kernel, but actually this will only get you one step further; which I will elaborate on momentarily.)

The trouble is that while this will be enough to get the installer to run, you will not be able to run the resulting installed NixOS! This is because Calamares writes the final configuration.nix of the new system, and it does not consider (wisely or otherwise) the system state of the installer image when it does so. 1

So, the answer, naturally, is fork Calamares and change it the way we want! In fact, glancing at the relevant derivation we learn that it’s calamares-nixos-extensions that we need to fork.