Install and Configure NixOS on a Linode Proposed Changes
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Assessment
- Difficulty
- 2/5
- Estimated time
- 1-3 hours
- Newbie friendliness
- 64/100
- Issue type
- Documentation
- Clarity
- Clearly specified
- Activity status
- Stale
- Tech stack
- linux
- Domain
- documentation
Research direction
Open the linked Install NixOS on Linode guide and find the “Rewrite Device Identifiers” section. Review the fileSystems and swapDevices blocks it instructs users to add to /mnt/etc/nixos/configuration.nix, then verify the guide leaves the generated hardware-configuration.nix entries unchanged. Done means the instructions no longer create conflicting device definitions and the nixos-install flow is consistent.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Link: https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/install-nixos-on-linode/
Issue
When following these instructions, I ran into this error when running the NixOS installer nixos-install.
Error snippet:
The option fileSystems."/".device has conflicting definition values:
- configuration.nix: /dev/sda
- hardware-configuration.nix: /dev/disk/by-uuid/...
Suggested Fix
Recommend removing the 'Rewrite Device Identifiers' section and its code. You're defining the same option twice:
- hardware-configuration.nix (generated by nixos-generate-config) already sets
fileSystems."/".deviceto a stable path like/dev/disk/by-uuid/.... - The guide then has you set it again in configuration.nix to /dev/sda, which creates a conflict
The fix was to remove the fileSystems."/" block and swapDevices block that the guide tells you to add to /mnt/etc/nixos/configuration.nix. Leave the entries in /mnt/etc/nixos/hardware-configuration.nix as-is (UUID-based). Re-run nixos-install
There are potential overrides but it works fine without those configuration settings.
All other instructions worked fine, except the installer disk size which has already been reported in issues 7348 and 7361. Thanks! Great guide.
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Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
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