nix-home

NixOS and Home Manager configurations and instructions.

Table of contents

• Check this page to setup your GPG keys.
• Check this page to know how to install NixOS on your laptop.
• Check this page to know how to install NixOS on your Kimsufi server.
• Check this page to apply userspace configurations.

Current channel

I am currently using unstable channel because I need those following packages.

• xfce 4.16
• neovim 0.5
• zig latest version

Note to self: when they will be available in 21.05, I can switch back to stable.

Server

For Plex to be first configured, you need to create an SSH tunnel.

ssh [email protected] -L 8888:localhost:32400

Non NixOS setup

If you want to apply the user configurations without having NixOS as the operating system, you can also follow the userspace configurations documentation.

Note that if you want to update your system, you should prefer the following command.

nix-channel --update; nix-env -iA nixpkgs.nix

Xfce

If you are running Ubuntu, you should install Xfce.

# for oldest Ubuntu versions, use this PPA to have an up to date version.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xubuntu-dev/staging

sudo apt update
sudo apt install xfce4 xfce4-goodies

I also usually prefer using lightdm instead of gdm because it is simpler.

sudo apt-get install lightdm
sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm

Reset default properties

Home manager will make sure xfce properties are set as desired when applying the configurations. However, it will not delete any existing default ones. And they might sometimes collapse with the one I define. To avoid this problem, the first time you apply configurations, make sure to reset existing properties that could potentially interfere.

xfconf-query -c xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts --reset --recursive  --property "/commands/custom"
xfconf-query -c xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts --reset --recursive  --property "/xfwm4/custom"
xfconf-query -c xfce4-panel --reset --recursive  --property "/plugins"

Troubleshooting

There is a bug in Ubuntu 18.04 preventing from using the xpresent vblank mode of the compositor. Problem has been fixed but not yet backported to bionic. So manually install the libxpresent1 package from eoan.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libxpresent/+bug/1801071

Then make sure you don't have any problems related to the window manager after login in ~/.xsession-errors.