Right now the UX for installing NixOS on a headless system is very bad.
To enable sshd without physical steps users have to have either physical
access or need to be very knowledge-able to figure out how to modify the
installation image by hand to put an `sshd.service` symlink in the
right directory in /nix/store. This is in particular a problem on ARM
SBCs (single board computer) but also other hardware where network is
the only meaningful way to access the hardware.
This commit enables sshd by default. This does not give anyone access to
the NixOS installer since by default. There is no user with a non-empty
password or key. It makes it easy however to add ssh keys to the
installation image (usb stick, sd-card on arm boards) by simply mounting
it and adding a keys to `/root/.ssh/authorized_keys`.
Importantly this should not require nix/nixos on the machine that
prepare the installation device and even feasiable on non-linux systems
by using ext4 third party drivers.
Potential new threats: Since this enables sshd by default a
potential bug in openssh could lead to remote code execution. Openssh
has a very good track-record over the last 20 years, which makes it
far more likely that Linux itself would have a remote code execution
vulnerability. It is trusted by millions of servers on many operating
systems to be exposed to the internet by default.
Co-authored-by: Samuel Dionne-Riel <samuel@dionne-riel.com>
With 'set 3 boot on' the error 'file system "/boot" is not a FAT EFI
system partition (ESP) file system' occurs when running
"nixos-install" during the basic installation (tested in in a
VirtualBox VM).
Virtualbox recommends VMSVGA for Linux guests.
It is also currently the only one supporting 3D acceleration
and it works out of the box with NixOS and auto screen resizing.
Running the manual on a TTY is useless in the graphical ISOs and not
particularly useful in non-graphical ISOs (since you can also run
'nixos-help').
Fixes#83157.
There's many reason why it is and is going to
continue to be difficult to do this:
1. All display-managers (excluding slim) default PAM rules
disallow root auto login.
2. We can't use wayland
3. We have to use system-wide pulseaudio
4. It could break applications in the session.
This happened to dolphin in plasma5
in the past.
This is a growing technical debt, let's just use
passwordless sudo.
Compatibility with other distributions/software and expectation
of users coming from other systems should have higher priority over consistency.
In particular this fixes#51375, where the NetworkManager-wait-online.service
broke as a result of this.
The previous tentative to the fix got the order mixed up a bit. This
new fix has been re-verified to get them in the good order as per the
instructions in the following chapters.
The tests in <nixos/tests/installer.nix> are using `parted`, so they are
bound to be better tested than `fdisk`.
This is brought on by a couple issues, plus reports on IRC that the
`fdisk` instructions didn't work as expected.
* #39354
* #46309
* #39942
* #45478
Care was taken so that the other documented steps did not need changes.
In all this kerfufle, a slight re-organization of the Chapter has been
made, allowing better deep linking.
