Re: Experience using the Nix service as a novice user

[Carlo Zancanaro <carlo@zancanaro.id.au>]

Hi Christian!

On Sun, Feb 04 2024, Christian Miller wrote:
> I wanted to try out the Nix service and followed the manual.  I had
> some trouble while doing so.  The following are the steps I took, the
> errors I encountered, and how I resolved them.  As well as feedback to
> the experience.

Thank you for this feedback!

I recently installed the Nix service myself, and ran into these rough
edges, but I didn't think to write them down or fix things. Thank you
for the clear and detailed prompt to do so.

I've just sent a patch to guix-patches with some updates to the manual
which attempts to add the pieces that you found were missing. Could you
have a look at that and make sure you're happy with what I've written?

> At this point, I started encountering problems.  The command
> "nix-channel --update" returns:
>
>         unpacking channels...
>         error: opening pseudoterminal master: No such device
>         error: program
>         '/gnu/store/mh2nc81cvw321q0lx4y38g4n7b86q88y-nix-2.16.1/bin/nix-env'
>         failed with exit code 1
>
> This was easy to fix because I had found this solution[1]
>
>         sudo herd restart nix-daemon

I didn't mention this in the manual, because this seems more like a bug
that should be fixed. I've also had the same issue, so I'll try to
investigate the next time it happens to see if I can fix it.

> I initially attempted this within a VM ($(guix system vm nix.scm) -m
> 4096 -smp 2) that had 4 GiB of memory and 2 cores.  The process was
> terminated. Is it normal for Nix to require such a large amount of
> resources to install a package?

I wouldn't expect it to need that much, unless it was needing to build
things from source. Usually Nix's substitute coverage is pretty good, so
I wouldn't expect you to need to build much from source.

Carlo