Recently, I’ve been wanting to make a custom live iso with a couple of tools that I need but I really don’t know where to start or what to do… any help?
E: I didn’t phrase my post correctly, I need a portable set of desktop tools for development, running on the gnome desktop
I hear ya. I recommend forking a setup and modding it slowly in a VM. That way, you can dial it in progressively.
I understand that it’s a sea change and documentation isn’t great but I’d posit that there are plenty of great setups on GitHub that will get you 99% of the way toward a working config. Whatever you decide, I hope you realize I’m not trying to pressure you. I just really love it once I got used to it’s way of working, coming from a more standard FHS Kubuntu config where I had to have weird scripts to mount discs on fstab on boot to do pretty standard stuff.
I have a VM part of my config (before I started putting anything that would even remotely expose good vectors of attack at all in an encrypted secure folder) that would work great and has all the fancy stuff like flakes, content-addressed derivations, and home-manager enabled by default.
Once a config works in NixOS, it is nearly impossible to break. That’s the thing I like about NixOS: once I get something working, it’s pretty much guaranteed to stay working and is 100% guaranteed to stay working if you never update the flake. I like to make progress and have that progress stick with me even when I refactor everything around it…and that certainly is the power of Nix/NixOS.
ok, but is there a way to turn the system I get out of configuring nix into a live iso easily?
Absolutely. I think there are even some tutorials out there. Once you arrive at something, please share it to help the mindshare. Feel free to look at my config at https://github.com/harryprayiv/nix-config (I added a branch for liveISO that I worked on for a bit) I have most of the stuff hidden in the secrets folder for my latest config but the plutusVM endpoint could get one 80% of the way there. You’d just have to change filesystem mounts. Maybe you could work in some code from: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Impermanence to really keep it wiping almost everything on reboot.
Thanks! I’ll take a better look at it and nixos (again) when I have time, I like how honest you are about text editors lol. Looks incredibly complicated at a 1st glance
the liveIso branch is SIGNIFICANTLY pared down for your consumption though admittedly I was unable to get the live iso part working.
I got a working, good, lightweight, kickass xmonad home-manager config into the system/machine/liveISO folder just for you.