💾 Archived View for thatit.be › 2023-10-07-09-17-42.gmi captured on 2024-07-09 at 00:34:51. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I saw so many board-specific entries on the NixOS on ARM page, but nothing for the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (that’s a mouthful, pz2w from here on out). I was beginning to think that maybe the pz2w wasn’t supported. I even went as far as trying other distributions before eventually circling back and seeing if I could at least get the image for the Pi 4 to boot on it.
On the page for the Pi 4 there was a note about how the 4B works with the generic aarch64 image. They had a generic aarch64 image?! I figured it couldn’t hurt, so I followed the link and downloaded the generic aarch64 image, wrote it to an SD card, and booted it up.
The boot was slow, the display lost signal during the boot, but when it came back on it was still booting up. Albeit slowly.
I generated a stock configuration file via the nixos-generate-config command and started a nixos-rebuild switch to make sure it was workable.
At this point the system ran out of RAM and became unresponsive as it tried to do the rebuild while thrashing wildly. I assume the thrashing was wild but it seems like the OOM killer would just start killing stuff and it would be over, but instead messages about memory pressure popped up and it took a really long time to die.
I created a swap file, tried again, and although it had to use a little swap, things went a little more smoothly the second time around. And very slowly. Did I mention it was slow to do the rebuild? btop was reporting a loadavg of 7.9 and about 85% of the RAM in use with 300MB of swap in use. Many, many Under memory pressure warnings later, it built a perfectly usable system without wpa_supplicant because I forgot to include wireless in the config. If I had rebooted I could have picked the previous build at boot and been fine, but before I tried that I played with nix-shell a bit and was able to launch an ephemeral shell with wpa_supplicant and try again. There’s probably a method to switch to the previous config, too, but it didn’t occur to me to look at the time.
A few more package tweaks and few more rebuilds, very slow rebuilds, I might add, I had a fully functional command line system on my pz2w. Now I need to make an appropriate housing for it. Something to hold a nice keyboard, a small screen, the pz2w, and a battery bank.
updated: 2023-10-08 15:47:30
generated: 2024-07-08