Nix

As much as I like NIX, I have encountered a growing number of issues with various bits and pieces. Which I am struggling to keep track off. This blog post is so I can try to keep track of some of these issues.

Dropbox

Dropbox support is broken and unmaintained.

Maestral works, but neither nixos or home-manager have any sort of built in module to automatically start it.

xdg-desktop-portal-gnome.service broken with i3/sway

See https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/206630

For X/i3 there is a work around:

services.xserver.displayManager.importedVariables = [
    "XDG_SESSION_TYPE"
    "XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP"
    "XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP"
];

For wayland/sway:

systemctl --user mask xdg-desktop-portal-gnome

Inefficiencies building rust - crane

Still need to look at this more. But when trying to build an application that uses Crane, I constantly end up rebuilding crane itself. And any changes to the application results in rebuilding all dependancies which I thought is what crane was suppose to fix.

Inefficiencies building rust - crate2nix

See https://github.com/cargo2nix/cargo2nix/issues/318

Also seems to be painful using with dependabot, because dependabot won’t automatically update the nix file.

Nixos and RPI3

I tried for many days to get the official 7inch screen working with nixos, but got nowhere.

I tried with a number of brands of HDMI touch screens too, but always had problems:

• Screen takes too long to turn back on after powering off. This makes my application seem sluggish - it powers the screen off when inactive - when trying to interact with it.
• Some screens result it noticable delay when interacting with app for almost a minute after powering on screen. Theory is these screens don’t implement CEC(?) calls correctly and wayland is timing out trying to interact with screen.

For now using rasbian with home-manager. Which isn’t as good, but it seems to work for now.

zoiper5

I built a flake for it, but it doesn’t run.

$ nix build
$ ./result/bin/zoiper
APP Started! [ PID: 242517 ]
APP Started! [ PID: 242519 ]
APP Started! [ PID: 242520 ]
[1]    242517 trace trap (core dumped)  ./result/bin/zoiper
[0100/000000.542523:ERROR:zygote_linux.cc(607)] Zygote could not fork: process_type gpu-process numfds 3 child_pid -1
[0100/000000.542600:ERROR:zygote_linux.cc(639)] write: Broken pipe (32)

Appears to be a chomium error. I think.

Probably should try running this within a Debian VM, think that should work.

tesla_auth

I just can’t get this simple rust application working correctly under nix, browser loads correctly, shows login, but cannot interact with website as it appears to be loading still.

Running this inside a Debian VM for now works.

Ruby

Hash mismatch error, see: https://github.com/nix-community/bundix/issues/109