As touched on previously, I've decided to work on installing NixOS onto a server on my home network. This is both to provide more immediate compatibility with build servers provided by sourcehut, and also aligns very nicely with my goal of being able to provide self-contained configurations.
I've probably come across Guix more than Nix given that I've used GNU Scheme for many purposes over the years, and so a leading question before installing NixOS is whether I should go with Guix instead. While Guix appeals to be more conceptually, the deciding factor is ultimately portability - I'd be looking for a toolset that can be used across the systems that I use and given that Nix documents use across a wider range whereas Guix seems far more tied to a GNU/Linux style environment, I'll stick with Nix.
For many years now I've gotten out of the habit of having any kind of removable media readily on hand - just preferring online transfers. Additionally I haven't organized much of what I don't regularly use since moving many years ago (having just started to do that a bit more intentionally)…so while I know I have such media around somewhere, I need to track it down.
While I know I have some more appropriate options such as thumb drives or SDCards, I also have piles of old hard drives I need to archive and get rid of and an adapter I picked up years ago that allows connecting IDE and SATA drives to USB ports (that particular adapter used to see a lot of action when repairs were part of my job). In the interest of both starting to clear out that pile and address the current need, I'll start with that route. The power supply/switch for the adapter seems a bit fickle (which almost led to my misdiagnosing a drive as dead), but after adjusting to not quite flipping the switch all the way I have two potentially usable drives (a 1TB Hitachi platter from 2010 and a 32GB solid state that's probably a couple years older - from back when solid state drives first started to be widely available).
I started with just a basic use of dd to load the NixOS
image onto the 1TB drive (the 32 seemingly already contains an old
Gentoo LiveCD so I can also try booting that) - I think there may be
some additional considerations to make sure it's bootable but I'll find
out by trying to boot an old laptop I have sitting around.
The old laptops I had planned on using were old Chromebooks..and while one of them has a custom bootloader either of them seem likely to introduce additional variables and therefore may be small projects themselves. I grabbed another couple more standard laptops…but they both coincidentally require 19V/4.72A DC power and I don't yet have one of those in my bucket o' power converters.
I also just found another old laptop, but this one is well over 20 years old (as opposed to the others that seem to be more along 10-15) and therefore is also probably not readily trustworthy in terms of supporting what I'm looking to test.
My preference for testing on a laptop is that I can do it while parenting, rather than working on the server in my basement.
The old chromebook with the custom bootloader did offer to boot from a portable hard drive which I was reluctant to wipe, but that implies that that could be a viable path forward. Given that I have the 1TB drive discovered above, I can shuffle the data around and load the NixOS boot image onto that external drive.
I also just located a 19V/4.72A adapter which can handle the other two laptops (as I start to also tackle organizing the upstairs of my house's barn).
Moving data aroudn to try to use the portable drive for booting is taking quite a while (USB on an old laptop probably doesn't help), so that will take up the rest of today.