Try it in a VM

Before you give nixarchy a disk, you can give it a window. #try boots the same installer ISO a release ships, in a local UEFI VM, and you answer the wizard yourself — the install you are practising is the install you will do.

This page is the one thing the repository explained and the site did not (#831). If you are already installing for real, Getting Started and The ISO in depth are the pages you want.

With Nix

nix run github:olafkfreund/nixarchy#try            # offline image, ~7 GB download
nix run github:olafkfreund/nixarchy#try -- --net   # network image, ~2 GB download

The offline image installs with no network at all — it carries its own store paths and copies them from the medium. The network image is smaller and fetches the rest from binary caches while installing. Both write a nixarchy-try.qcow2 in the current directory, up to 32 GB.

When the install finishes:

What it refuses to do quietly

Everything heavy is announced before it starts, and the things that cannot work are refused rather than attempted:

• A download or a source build? It says which. If the commit you are on has no cached image, it falls back to the latest release’s prebuilt, install-tested one — verified against that release’s checksums — instead of compiling for hours without telling you.
• RAM and disk are checked first: 8 GB by default, --memory to shrink.
• /dev/kvm is checked. Without it the VM still runs, with a loud warning, several times slower.
• No display? It serves the screen over VNC on 127.0.0.1:5900 rather than dying.

Without Nix, from any Linux

#try is a nix run app, so it needs Nix. On Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch or anything else, a script needs only qemu and curl from your own package manager:

curl -fLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/olafkfreund/nixarchy/main/installer/try-nixarchy.sh
less try-nixarchy.sh          # it is going to download an image and start a VM
bash try-nixarchy.sh

It fetches the latest release’s installer image, checks it against that release’s own SHA256SUMS, and boots it in a UEFI VM. --boot, --fresh and --help work as above.

It takes the latest release and cannot resolve a particular commit. If you have Nix, #try is the better door and says so.

After it is installed, on real hardware

A VM cannot answer the questions that need the machine itself. From inside a running session:

nix run github:olafkfreund/nixarchy#verify

It asks what no VM check can — hardware rendering, Bluetooth pairing, the RetroArch cores — and prints what it found rather than a verdict, because the answers depend on hardware nobody else has. How this is tested explains which layer answers what, and why some questions only a person can settle.

Where to go next

• It worked and you want it for real: Getting Started
• You want to keep Windows on the same disk: Dual boot
• You want the install to answer its own questions: Unattended installs
• Something went wrong: Troubleshooting