GoKawiilIn which I painstakingly remove functionality from a Linux live image. Like a normal person.
But first, I can haz ISO at all
One of NixOS' cooler party tricks is that you can trivially take some configuration and run it as a virtual machine (VM). nixos-rebuild build-vm will give you one for your system configuration . But you can also do it for any given configuration you want, system or not!
let pkgs = import ( fetchTarball { url = "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/567a49d1913ce81ac6e9582e3553dd90a955875f.tar.gz" ; sha256 = "1vq77hlx8mi3z03pw2nf6r5h7473r1p9yxyf58ym3fh01zppmfln" ; }) {}; in pkgs . nixos { system . stateVersion = "26.05" ; services . getty . autologinUser = "root" ; }
That's enough to get a minimal VM, you can run it yourself with $(nix-build basic-vm.nix --attr vm --log-format bar --no-out-link)/bin/run-nixos-vm .
This will create a "thin" VM: there's a disk image, but it only contains the files you've made yourself once you're inside of the VM. Everything else (cough /nix/store ) gets mounted in from your host OS instead.
And that's great when it fits, but sometimes we just need something a bit more normal. Something we can just run in libvirt , or even ship off to some remote host that might not have Nix. It might not even run Linux at all. Hell, there might not even be a hypervisor!
In short, I just want a damn ISO.
Thankfully, NixOS still has my back here:
let pkgs = import ( fetchTarball { url = "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/567a49d1913ce81ac6e9582e3553dd90a955875f.tar.gz" ; sha256 = "1vq77hlx8mi3z03pw2nf6r5h7473r1p9yxyf58ym3fh01zppmfln" ; }) {}; in pkgs . nixos ({ lib , ... }: { system . stateVersion = "26.05" ; services . getty . autologinUser = "root" ; imports = [ " ${pkgs . path} /nixos/modules/installer/cd-dvd/iso-image.nix" ]; image . baseName = lib . mkForce "nixos" ; })
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