Articles related to the [NixOS](https://nixos.org/) Linux distribution, or the underlying Nix language and tool (and associated nixpkgs, of course).
2025 › August
-
Passwords and secrets like cryptographic key files are everywhere in computing. When configuring a Linux system, sooner or later you will need to put a password somewhere — for example, when I migrated my existing Linux Network Storage (NAS) setup to NixOS, I needed to specify the desired Samba passwords in my NixOS config (or manage them manually, outside of NixOS). For personal computers, this is fine, but if the goal is to share system configurations (for example in a Git repository), we need a different solution: Secret Management. Read more →
2025 › July
-
I wanted to use GoCV for one of my projects (to find and extract paper documents from within a larger scan), without permanently having OpenCV on my system. This seemed like a good example use-case to demonstrate a couple of Nix commands I like to use, covering quick interactive one-off dev shells to fully declarative, hermetic, reproducible, shareable dev shells. Read more →
-
In this article, I want to show how to migrate an existing Linux server to NixOS — in my case the CoreOS/Flatcar Linux installation on my Network Attached Storage (NAS) PC. I will show in detail how the previous CoreOS setup looked like (lots of systemd units starting Docker containers), how I migrated it into an intermediate state (using Docker on NixOS) just to get things going, and finally how I migrated all units from Docker to native NixOS modules step-by-step. Read more →
2025 › June
-
For one of my network storage PC builds, I was looking for an alternative to Flatcar Container Linux and tried out NixOS again (after an almost 10 year break). There are many ways to install NixOS, and in this article I will outline how I like to install NixOS on physical hardware or virtual machines: over the network and fully declaratively. Read more →