mbbx6spp/mbp-nixos

Contrary to other reports on the internet (in the wild) you do not need to prerpare your bootable USB installer on another Linux distro.

You should be using 16.03 or 16.09 images at this point!

As of 2016-10-15 here are the latest nixos image download locations:

• NixOS 16.09

Download the minimal ISO from the link above.

The command I used on my NixOS box was the following, though on OSX you should be able to use /dev/disk2 or similar after unmounting the USB drive in OSX.

When preparing your USB install drive on Linux run:

When preparing your USB install drive on OS X or BSD-based distributions run:

You will need to resize your OSX partition. I did this by booting into the OSX Recovery partition and using the Disk Utility from there.

To boot into the Recovery partition you hold down the Cmd+R keys on boot startup until you see it enter Recovery mode.

Boot from the USB drive by holding down the Option key during the boot startup tone until you see options of devices to boot from.

You will likely need to choose the second option called 'EFI Boot'.

If you are unsure on how to configure your partitions consult the man gdisk. I suggest the following basic setup (this is what I did):

I did this with the following commands after stage2 loaded in the NixOS installer:

If you do not already have a vfat filesystem for boot images you will need to run the following command (I didn’t need to do this):

Now we need to mount the new or existing filesystems:

Make sure you mount /dev/sda1 under /mnt/boot.

After that run: nixos-generate-config --root /mnt

After this you may want to modify the configuration.nix to include gummiboot.

Then run: nixos-install

My /etc/nixos/configuration.nix for the MBP can be found at etc/nixos/configuration.nix.

Some parts of note that are required for the MBP are:

Boot Options

{
  # Other stuff up here....

  boot.loader.grub.enable = false;
  boot.loader.systemd-boot.enable = true;
  # Whether or not the installation process should modify EFI boot variables
  boot.loader.efi.canTouchEfiVariables = true;
  # If you rely on a dirty /tmp dir you are doing it wrong. Your laptop will
  # never be cattle.
  boot.cleanTmpDir = true;
  # This gets your audio output and input (mic) working
  boot.extraModprobeConfig = ''
    options libata.force=noncq
    options resume=/dev/sda5
    options snd_hda_intel index=0 model=intel-mac-auto id=PCH
    options snd_hda_intel index=1 model=intel-mac-auto id=HDMI
    options snd_hda_intel model=mbp101
    options hid_apple fnmode=2
  '';

  # some other stuff below here
}

Tidbit: Audio

$ amixer -q set Master toggle # mute/unmute
$ amixer -q set Master 5%- # decrease volume by 5%
$ amixer -q set Master 5%+ # increase volume by 5%

Tidbit: Brightness / Visual Tempurature

  services.redshift.enable = true;
  services.redshift.brightness.day = "0.8";
  services.redshift.brightness.night = "0.4";
  services.redshift.latitude = "0.0000";
  services.redshift.longitude = "0.0000";

$ cat /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness # echos current brightness level
10
$ cat /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/max_brightness # echos max brightness level
100
$ echo 25 | sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness # sets brightness to 25/100
$ cat /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness
25