Os

Yesterday I experimented with NixOS and Debian. I managed to install NixOS on the Pi4 and I managed to implement several changes to the configuration.nix file before the Pi started to overheat and become much slower. At this point I tried to run Debian and that worked.

At first Debian was running in command line mode so I took the time to install the KDE desktop and that’s when I ran into the same limitation of the Pi4. It tends to get hot and slow down to a crawl.

During the weekend it was warm and beautiful. It was so warm and beautiful that my bag got to 40+ degrees centigrade, with an average of over 30°c. Today as I drove to the shops for food I noticed that the snow line was even lower.

Yesterday it was on the top of the Jura, around La Dole, and today it’s down two thirds of the mountain. It’s cold enough to feel cold when walking. I need to wear more layers once again.

For a few weeks I have tried to install NixOS on a raspberry Pi without much success. I have finally managed to get NixOS to work with a GUI/Desktop environment. I kept getting stuck at the command prompt but in the end I found a blog post that helped me.

What I Struggled With

The first thing I struggled with was finding a version of NixOS that played nicely with Pi’s processor. With some distributions you download it, install and it’s easy. With NixOS it took some searching to find the right ISO image that I also had to download a tool to unzip.