I’ve managed to recently upgrade my image building process for this website, using some of what I have been learning about Nix. For a while while I was first learning to use Nix I thoguht of the language, the packages, and the OS as being one thing. And this did a disservice to both the breadth of what Nix offers as well as the capabilities it offers.
Old Paradigm So previously with this site I used a fairly straightforward and manual process.
If you are interested in running multiple versions of the same development language using Nix and Nix Flakes, ride along while I setup a development environment that includes Python 2.7, 3.5-3.12 along with necessary development libraries. I will not be covering installing Nix on your system or the basics of the Nix package system or language. At the link above, you can see and fetch the flake.nix file. Each commit in the repository corresponds to a version of the file in this post.
So I’ve been playing around with NixOS on a Raspberry Pi 4 that I have at the house. NixOS seems like a great idea, but getting it onto the Raspberry Pi 4 is something of a beast of a process. So I wanted to document here how I did it. Most of the process is the normal NixOS installation process, with a few tweaks at the very end.
My Pi’s Case is a Challenge Rather than having a plain Raspberry Pi 4 and writing the SD image provided by the NixOS team to that image, I have my Pi in an [Argon One m.