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trouble getting NixOS on my GPD Win 2

Summary:

23.11 media failed to boot
resorted to 20.x to complete the install
boot order was not configured correctly
upgraded the system to 23.11 post install

the saga begins

I have a GPD Win 2 that had Artix Linux on it. I keep running into key issues because I go long periods of time without connecting to the internet. I was going to install NixOS on it, but the latest installer ISO would just drop back to UEFI when I tried to boot anything from it. I resorted to using a much older installer with the intention of updating to the latest. I copied over my configuration.nix from my other x86-64 system and commented out the stuff that isn’t valid yet. I ran the install, and it appeared to go fine, but then rebooting it drops to a prompt in UEFI-land instead of booting. That was last night, not sure if it was the UEFI shim complaining it couldn’t find grub or if it was grub complaining it couldn’t find something. I’ll poke at it some more this evening.

that evening

I didn’t get to it. Remembered it as I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep.

this morning

I picked a few different boot entries that were apparently stale and it seemed like none of them worked. I booted up with the live disk again, invoked efibootmgr and found that the default was an old grub entry instead of the new NixOS system. I started deleting the entries and old files that look wrong.

Picking the right entry from the UEFI menu does boot the system.

After a reboot I failed to set a new boot order, and I’ve fixed that now, but I’m waiting for the system to update. I went with 20.something to avoid the issues I had with the 23.11 install media, and I’d really like to get the system up to 23 before I start debugging any hardware problems. I’d also like to turn back on the different software and features in my config that I had to comment out just for the install.

Wishing I had switched to the Starlink network before kicking off the upgrade but I was on my regular network copying config files over for my user’s X environment.

Turns out upgrading is fairly straightforward:

nix-channel --add https://channels.nixos.org/nixos-23.11 nixos
nixos-rebuild switch

finally

The upgrade went well, I was able to un-comment the sections from my config and it’s all working. I have some small tweaks to make due to the hardware (rotating the framebuffer, rotating the x11 display, customizing button layouts) because the hardware is a little strange, but the base install is ready to go for normal use.

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