nixwrt VS not-os

tl;dr: here are three commercial embedded NixOS uses and a couple of other embedded NixOS projects

1. LumiGuide uses NixOS for their embedded systems, which track automatic bicycle rentals at little solar-powered stations IIRC: https://av.tib.eu/media/39625 (also some coverage here: https://www.worksonarm.com/blog/nixos/ )

2. Yakkertech uses NixOS for their embedded systems, which do baseball pitch tracking: https://av.tib.eu/media/50713

3. Swift Navigation uses NixOS for CI/CD for the embedded systems they use for GPS and navigation: https://blog.swiftnav.com/using-nixos-to-manage-hardware-tes...

I'd only heard of the first two, and discover the third just now.

There are also two downstream distros/related projects that target embedded systems, but idk how much commercial use they've yet seen, if any:

a. https://github.com/telent/nixwrt

b. https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os

You might want to check out https://github.com/telent/nixwrt and https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os as solutions with similar goals. The former is a promising but yet-unfinished way of using Nix to manage a router, while the latter is a similar way of using Nix to generate an immutable OS image.

And, if you take into consideration my personal, subjective opinions on what a distro must be (declarative, fearless to tinker with, mostly binary based but with easy overrides, mostly stateless, easy to roll back in case something goes wrong), then that leaves pretty much two options: NixOS and Guix, and because I don't really like LISP syntax, I go with NixOS as my favourite distro for desktops and servers. For embedded, I've recently tried NixWrt and it seems to work quite well, however I'm still using OpenWRT for "mission-critical" routers.

Hi. I'm new to nix and want to ask if you have an idea how to build an ISO image file of not-os and run it on QEMU virt vanager?

Maybe not-os?

oh oops, I think I was intending to type "crowd source" but I really met "crowd fund".

I do want to finish my FreeBSD cross PR, but is is hard. We already have NetBSD working, including building the kernel, so I think it is better to start there.

I opened https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os/issues/16 because I think that would be the absolute easiest first step, with the fewest moving parts. But I don't know how kernels, even Linux, are packaged into bootable thingies at all.

I also found this: https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os

It's like an OS that has builtin salt/ansible/chef/puppet.

Because Nix language describe the OS instead of what to change/configure it's superior to these tools, and solves the problem that supposedly same machines are drifting apart.

For example if in the CM you tell it to install a package, then change your mind and remove the entry that does it. The package will remain installed.

With NixOS if you remove the package from configuration, it's gone.

I personally really like Nix's building capability. For example I can use it to generate a minimal docker container. It requires some knowledge, but I can also modify compilation options in dependencies (like remove unneeded functionality).

It looks like there's also an option to similarly build lightweight OS images[1]. I haven't tried it yet but looks cool.

[1] https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os

You might want to check out https://github.com/telent/nixwrt and https://github.com/cleverca22/not-os as solutions with similar goals. The former is a promising but yet-unfinished way of using Nix to manage a router, while the latter is a similar way of using Nix to generate an immutable OS image.