As a real professional, I must start with a tweet 😉

I skip the Virtual Box & Ubuntu Minimal installation. I choose Ubuntu minimal as a base since I want to really start from scratch and try to setup also the window manager.

Another question I want to answer straight away is: Why don't I just start using NixOs instead? Honestly, I don't have a strong reason, I can say I want to start as minimal as possible and from a thing I know. Plus, it should be quicker to set up a minimal virtual machine rather then one with NixOs.

The only word I can think of is: overwhelming, but not in a good way. It has so much stuff that you, newcomer, will feel confused and disoriented. You might thing «Oh, let's read the manual/guide from the official site», well there are tons of stuff: the Nix language, the Nixos, the different commands, multi-user setup, profiles and much much more. The only thing I found useful was how to install Nix and that's it.

What I'm searching is: how to setup my own configuration, then, when the need arise, I will go and search how to create a Set or a function with the Nix language. Instead, a lot of the guides doesn't start from a simple plain configuration with, let's say, just wget and 7zip.

So, I kept reading and reading, landing finally on Reddit. They suggest to take an existing configuration and start by modifying that. I must say the majority of the guides are about NixOs instead of just Nix on a non-NixOs distribution, like I'm trying to do.

As every Emacs user, I already have my Emacs configuration jealously crafted and polished. Now, I don't want to restart from scratch and specify all the packages I have and so on. Plus, I have some custom elisp functions I wish to preserve. Fortunately, Nix gives you a way to fetch something from Github using fetchFromGitHub function. (Manual Section)

So, the idea here is to:

• Download your configuration from Github: provide the owner, repository, reference to the specific commit or tag and hash SHA256 of the resulting directory
• Tell Nix to copy it into the $HOME/.emacs.d/ directory. I can't move it since Nix stores immutable directories in his store. Therefore, you must just make a copy to the desired location. Fortunately the Emacs configuration, without compilation packages is not that big.
• Setup the Emacs server hook. (Optional, advanced topic)

And that should be it. I took this issue as a reference. EDIT: After a little bit more research I found this better answer: emacs.d home-manager dot file(directory)

This works, BUT!!! the result will be all symlinks to the Nix store. Then, you can't actually change anything from the configuration itself because Nix store immutable data. You should change it somewhere else, commit, recalculate the sha256…a full-pain. Then, you have to put a simple shell snippet to copy the source to the $HOME/.emacs.d/ folder and change the permissions in order to be able to change it.

Huge downside of using fetchFromGitHub is that it just download the tarball and extract it's content. Therefore, your Emacs .git folder is not downloaded and then, when you move it to the right place with the shell snippet you don't have the git repository. Now, you can decide to use fetchGit with the option leaveDotGit = true to solve the issue, but remember that Nix rely on sha256 and bring the .git folder down will increase the probability of a mismatch!! (source)

As a result, you will have your beloved emacs.d configuration maintained in another repository. The only weirdness I noticed was that the resulting git repository is set on a new branch called fetchgit. What you have to do is to:

• Setup the remote: git add remote origin https://github.com/....
• Create & checkout a new branch from master.
• Delete the fetchgit.

Now the question is: does in work consistently? Is it actually reproducible? Future myself will tell.

emacs configuration commit

I must say the amount of available packages is huge: I found (almost) all I needed straight out of the main channels. I had some trouble installing the amule package due to a missing library (crypto++) and the home-manager build became quite slow checking the packages, but overall it went smoothly more then expected.

add packages and todos to the home.nix

I added more packages, I added the keyboard configuration and so on, then I looked into how to setup I3 and X11. Well, as a result I caused an infinite login loop, inserting startx into the .bash_profile. Apparently it tried just to turn back to login again!!

Well, I guess it's time to try to setup a new virtual machine then.

As you could imagine, setting up X11 and XOrg is not that straight forward as the other packages. The reason behind this is because online you can find a lot of articles using NixOs that provides a system layer, meanwhile in here I don't have that, I need to setup everything into the home-manager that seems to have a subset of the configurations you can specify in NixOs.

For example, in the following pages all reference to the Nix configurations in the etc folder:

XMonad NixOs Installation Page Gabriel Volpe's XMonad Configuration

edit: I start thinking that, installing XOrg into VirtualBox is not a wonderful Idea and it might just not work. I'm thinking about creating a Virtual machine with a GUI in place. I know it's a fallback from the initial plan, but I have to reduce the amount of weirdness if I wish to proceed 😃

After tons of trials, finally, I have to give up on setting the Window Manager. Basically, if you are using NixOs it should be easy: you have your own /etc/nixos/configuration.nix where you set your system configuration and then, on $HOME/.config/nixos/home.nix you can enable thing on the user side easily. The problem here is that you are bound to NixOs. You can install it with nix-in-place, but in my mind you should be able to CONFIGURE everything you want without having to go into the specific Linux distribution.

I might ask for help in the future into some IRC channel or wherever.

After the failure of the previous section I decided that I can live without setting my window manager for now (The Fox & The Grapes), what about Scala and Haskell then? Well, guess what, I cloned a bunch of project in both languages and I wasn't able to compile them in the virtual machine.

Sbt

MissingRequirementError: Object java.lang.object
in compiler mirror not found

Stack

libgmp.10.so: cannot open shared open file

For both this errors I scanned the internet for HOURS without any success. After all this pain, I'm really considering to just have an additional shell script to run post-Nix. At least I can get what I can't set from Nix…if I just don't consider the whole experiment a failure, but definitely it is not going the way I was hoping for. Especially considering that I could just install the haskell-plaftorm with a one-liner command.