- Pre-activation failure ("desktop pre-activation failed"): the in-chroot
HM build hard-coded `--option substituters ""`, which only works on
OFFLINE installs (where the ISO store is copied in). Online installs
(now common — wifi works) had no pins and built from source. Fix: build
the generation in the live env (its store always has the pins), nix copy
the closure to the target, chroot only activates. In-chroot build kept
as fallback. Uses path: (not git+file:) to sidestep libgit2 ownership.
- Read-only home.nix: templates come out of the store mode 0444 and cp
preserves it — chmod -R u+w after staging so the user can edit it.
- Keyboard + locale selection: gum prompts (localectl layouts/variants +
curated UTF-8 locale list) and NOMARCHY_LOCALE/KB_LAYOUT/KB_VARIANT for
unattended. One choice flows everywhere — services.xserver.xkb (source
of truth) + console.useXkbConfig (tty/greeter) + boot.initrd.systemd
(so the LUKS passphrase prompt uses the layout; script initrd can't) +
the generated home.nix's nomarchy.keyboard.* for the Hyprland session.
- test-install.sh: NOMARCHY_OVMF env override for sandboxed OVMF paths.
Verified end-to-end in QEMU: offline LUKS install completes, boots to a
themed desktop (no autogenerated-config banner), Plymouth renders the LUKS
prompt on the theme-tinted background.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The pre-activation log (now persisted) showed activate dying at its
profile operation: as the target user with no daemon in the chroot,
nix can't open the store db ("big-lock: Permission denied"). Run a
temporary nix-daemon inside the chroot and point activate at it via
NIX_REMOTE=daemon. HOME_MANAGER_BACKUP_EXT=bak makes file collisions
(e.g. a stray autogenerated hyprland.conf) move aside instead of
aborting. Verified in the chroot on a real installed disk: HM symlinks
land, collision backed up.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The HM pre-activation never ran: the script was written to /mnt/tmp and
nixos-enter mounts a fresh tmpfs over /tmp inside the chroot, so `bash
/tmp/...` found nothing and the best-effort guard swallowed it. Verified
interactively that every inner step (path: build as root, runuser leg)
works in the chroot — only the staging path was broken. Now staged in
/root, with set -x logging persisted to /var/log/nomarchy-hm-preactivate.log
on the target and the tail echoed into the install transcript on failure.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The chown fix made the flake user-owned, and root's libgit2 then refuses
git+file fetches of it ("not owned by current user") — which silently
killed the seeding step under set -e and would equally break
nixos-install --flake. Use path: refs for the live-side archive and the
nixos-install invocation (path flakes read flake.lock, skip libgit2),
and make seeding failure non-fatal as intended.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
End-to-end VM verification found the installed system perfect (LUKS,
auto-login, swapfile+resume, snapper) except: ~/.nomarchy was root-owned,
so libgit2 refused every `home-manager switch` ("repository not owned by
current user"). chown 1000:users after generation (the account doesn't
exist in the target yet — numeric ids).
The chroot pre-activation now builds via path: instead of git+file —
no libgit2, no ownership sensitivity — and the fallback message suggests
-b bak (a default-config Hyprland session leaves an autogenerated
hyprland.conf in the way otherwise; observed live).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Substituter plumbing through nixos-install proved unreliable (env config
is overridden by its hardcoded flags; the forwarded --substituters flag
still left the plan building gcc from source). Make every ISO path valid
in the target store with one nix copy --all before nixos-install — the
in-target build then resolves everything locally and only the per-machine
config drvs are built.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
nixos-install hardcodes --extra-substituters "auto?trusted=1" as a CLI
flag, and flags override NIX_CONFIG for the same setting — so the env
fix never reached the in-target build. nixos-install forwards a
--substituters flag verbatim; use that.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
nixos-install builds with --store /mnt and passes its own substituter as
"auto?trusted=1", which in that context resolves to the target store
itself — so nothing flowed from the ISO and nix fell back to a
full-source bootstrap (gcc/python/bash tarball fetches → offline death).
Host-store simulation (fresh local?root, substituters cleared) proves
"daemon?trusted=1" makes the whole install substitute + build offline:
1125 paths copied, only the per-machine config drvs built locally.
Also drop --offline from the chroot HM build (that flag disables ALL
substituters; plain empty substituters does what we want without it).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
`nix flake archive --to` rejects locally-evaluated source paths ("lacks
a signature by a trusted key"); enumerate the archive tree as JSON and
copy with --no-check-sigs instead.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Offline nixos-install still built from source: the drvs that embed the
user's hostname/username/UUIDs (etc, initrd, toplevel, HM activation)
must be REBUILT, and their builders need tools outside every runtime
closure (etc → python3-minimal, initrd → packing tools). Pin each drv's
inputDerivation into the ISO — the standard nixos-test offline trick.
Also: with no network every substituter query is a DNS retry storm that
ends in a nix goal.cc assertion crash (core dump observed); the installer
now probes connectivity and disables substituters when offline, both on
the live system and inside the nixos-enter HM pre-activation.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Found by running the unattended install in an offline QEMU VM:
- compgen is missing from nixpkgs' non-interactive bash (the package
shebang) — replaced with plain glob tests in hardware-db and prewipe
- disko's eval resolves <nixpkgs> via NIX_PATH (a dead channel on the
ISO) and tried channels.nixos.org — export NIX_PATH to the pinned
nixpkgs source and point the flake registry at an empty baked file
- lock nomarchy by path (the source the ISO carries) instead of
git+https: git inputs clone even when narHash is known, which kills
offline installs; `original` keeps the forge URL so a later
`nix flake update` re-resolves normally. Works from dirty-tree ISOs too.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- LUKS2 is the installer default; in exchange the generated config sets
the new nomarchy.system.greeter.autoLogin (greetd initial_session) —
the disk passphrase already gates the machine.
- @snapshots subvolume + nomarchy.system.snapper.enable: hourly/daily
timeline snapshots of / and the nixos-rebuild-snap helper, ported from
the previous iteration (3bdfc35), guarded to no-op on non-BTRFS roots.
- @swap subvolume with a swapfile sized to RAM by default (disko
mkswapfile handles NOCOW); the installer computes the resume offset
and wires boot.resumeDevice + resume_offset for hibernation.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ported from the previous iteration's installer (3bdfc35), adapted to the
mkFlake world. gum TUI: disk pick, optional LUKS2, user/hostname/timezone,
DMI → nixos-hardware autodetection (hardware-db.sh). disko partitions
GPT + 1 GiB ESP + BTRFS subvolumes; the generated machine flake lands at
~user/.nomarchy (one mkFlake call, /etc/nixos symlinks to it) and
nixos-install makes it bootable (UEFI/systemd-boot, v1 single disk).
Offline by construction: the target flake.lock is composed from the rev
the ISO was built from (compose-lock.py), `nix flake archive` seeds the
target store, and the ISO pre-builds the template system + desktop.
First boot lands themed: the HM generation is pre-activated in chroot.
mkFlake grows two things for this: hardwareProfile now also takes a list
(autodetection emits several common-* modules), and installed systems get
the standalone home-manager CLI from the pinned input. Unattended mode
(NOMARCHY_UNATTENDED=1 + env) documented in docs/TESTING.md §4.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
