nix-config VS vanitygen-plusplus

Just the other week I used Nix on my laptop to derive a PXE boot images, uploaded those to IPFS, and netbooted my server in another country over a public IPFS mirror. The initrd gets mounted as read-only overlayfs on boot. My configs are public: https://github.com/jhvst/nix-config

You should look into configuring your neovim with home-manager. This wraps the tools needed for various language servers in a way that solves your concern. Upside is that now you can also move the whole neovim configuration into servers etc., if you prefer that, just by importing your neovim configuration. I have done this in my configuration.

Plugging my own thing here, but I have been experimenting with a Nix configuration for gaming only. My configuration is here (for Nvidia, which does not work without tinkering as AMD does) : https://github.com/jhvst/nix-config/blob/main/nvidia.nix

First, this is a whole system specification. This means that executing this on Nix will build you a whole OS image. You can build the image if you have Nix by running the first line on file. You can also use Docker with the instruction on my README: https://github.com/jhvst/nix-config

Back to elaborating on the Nix file from the gaming perspective. First, we have the overlays. These are like patches to the packages, and really useful for gaming because it allows building important packages like mesa from the source tip. This is particularly useful when new games or GPUs are released. Same thing for wayland: Nvidia and its proprietary drivers need some patching, but it's possible to get wayland (and sway) to work this way.

Then, I have taken the reproducibility of Nix to a next step in my opinion, and made the system stateless. This means that it runs from the RAM. It is easy to create installation media like kernel, initrd, and rootfs because you have all the steps to create the distribution. This means that here, Nix works as a meta-distro like Gentoo, on top of which you develop your own. Running from the RAM means that theoretically, if you have a working config, and two people with different hardware runs it, then they should have the same experience. If you look at ProtonDB, you often find that some people claim that game X works on their machine with drivers and mesa of Y and Z, but there is no way to copy their configurations because it's certain that the user has made some stateful changes which they have forgotten hence left undocumented, which is the reason it works for them. If everyone would be using Nix, you could reproduce their system and possibly fix your own, but this is not tractable with most OSs.

If you like to test my changes, you can read more about my approach here: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/203750

For testing I distribute Nvidia as documented here: https://github.com/jhvst/jhvst.github.io/blob/main/ramdisk.m...

However, I have developed it bit further: if you manage to get into an iPXE shell, you can write `boot -a http://boot.ponkila.com/menu.ipxe`, then select the second option which is Nvidia (proprietary drivers), and with some waiting you will get into a shell prompt to which you can write `sway --unsupported-gpu`, which will launch sway. Cmd+Enter opens a prompt to which you can write `steam`, which will open Steam. Then, you have to mount some drive on another shell with `mount`, and add this as a Steam library via Steam's UI. Then you can play games. I use this on AMD and I have been very happy.

You will need to have a DHCP server which has to be configured with ARM 64 bit file name option to point to the efi/boot/bootaa64.efi in the TFTP server alongside option called UEFI HTTPBoot URL which has to point to the RPI_EFI.d file from the ipxe project builds. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to apply the DHCP settings unless you happen to run pfSense, which has the option under DHCP server settings. If you manage to do this some other way, you can then add a file called autoexec.ipxe to the efi/boot folder. You can generate the autoexec.ipxe file by running the following script, for example: https://github.com/jhvst/nix-config/blob/main/minimal.nix (the command to run it is in the first line of the file).

I am using vanitygen++: https://github.com/10gic/vanitygen-plusplus

There is a tool to make 'vanity addresses' here: https://github.com/10gic/vanitygen-plusplus you can specify a prefix and it will make billions of keys to find the key to an address with your prefix. You could then import this key to core, or whatever wallet you prefer.

One could easily hack the bitcrack code for beckh32 but checkout vanitygen use -Z to specify the known part of the key https://github.com/10gic/vanitygen-plusplus I’m fairly sure it can do bech32 out of the box

I run NixOS, but I'm relatively new to Nix. A couple weeks ago I was trying to get an old vanity key generator to build because it wasn't on nixpkgs (vanitygen++) and on a lark I decided to write my own derivation using some examples of similar C++ packages I found and figuring out what nix packages it needed to build. So I did, and the maintainer accepted the PR: https://github.com/10gic/vanitygen-plusplus/commit/7bcee06f3... Note that I am not a C++ developer and only know the basics about how to get C/C++ things to build.

So what does this get us? In theory, this is now trivially-buildable on any distro that has nix installed, or on nixos. I haven't converted it to a flake yet (still learning that) but if I (or someone else) did, it would be deterministically reproducible anywhere on nix.

I agree that there's a learning curve on figuring out the "recipe" for a thing, but once someone does that work, it's basically done forever. Which is a promise that no other system can even approach.

And once you figure out a certain amount of it, this moment will come where you realize you want every system you deal with to be Nixified. Like the guy elsewhere in this thread who rebuilt his own router using NixOS and loves it.

Getting new developers up to speed in your shop's dev environment? Completely trivial to do with Nix. Getting a machine back up after a failure? Reinstall NixOS and reapply the config you were using (which is in source control). Upgraded Gnome and some things you need broke? Or updated your GPU driver and now your screen just shows black? Simple... Roll back in the bootloader to a previously-working config, then undo your changes to the config definition.

NixOS (and very honorable mention to Guix) are in fact the only ways to run Linux while keeping your sanity intact!

It probably wouldn't be that hard to package.

For example, I committed this to a fork of a C++ package a few days ago just to be able to build it in Nix; it's literally just 1 step away to go from building it here to putting this in nixpkgs but I don't want to be responsible for it (I've also never taken that step yet) and it also doesn't (yet) use Flakes: https://github.com/10gic/vanitygen-plusplus/blob/master/defa...

In theory, though, you'd just have to find a similar Node example out there and crib off its nix config/build file. And if you converted it to a flake, you'd have a guaranteed-reproducible build (but then you'd also be responsible for updating it). Perhaps that's why nixpkgs has one of the highest package counts in the Linux space of package managers.

i think vanitygen++ has a split-key generation feature