Installing NixOS on an ASUS EeePC 701

Those of you familiar with the ASUS EeePC 701 will be aware of it's limited memory (512M) and small internal drive (4G) which doesn't render it useless but does reduce it's modern usage.

I have two of these still in perfect working order and wanted to extend their functional lives. I have no need of any more routers and there are Raspberry Pi's everywhere here. I do have kids though and decided these would make great, ready made portable retro gaming consoles.

This blog post details how I installed NixOS and configured the 701's to overcome their short comings to extend their life.

At a Glance

1. Download the latest NixOS minimal installer for 32-bit Intel/AMD.
2. Boot off USB
3. Set forcepae in Grub
4. Connect networking
5. Partition then format the SD card as / and the internal drive as swap
6. Run the configuration builder
7. Copy across nix files
8. Install
9. Enjoy

Process Detail

Have a copy of the NixOS manual handy. It will also be at [ALT]+[F8] once the installer has booted.

Booting

1. Download the minimal installation CD, 32-bit Intel/AMD image and burn it to a USB stick.
2. Insert the SD card and USB stick into the 701 (I used a spare 8G SD card I had handy).
3. Power the 701 on and press [ESC], select the USB stick as the boot device,
4. [TAB] at grub menu, append forcepae
5. Continue the boot process until it reaches a root prompt
6. If you have not connected Ethernet, connect to WiFi using wpa_supplicant, as per manual.

Partitioning and Formatting

With only a little deviation from section 2.2.2. Legacy Boot (MBR) we format the SD card to be the root disk and the internal drive as swap:

• Create an MBR on the internal drive:

  # parted /dev/sda -- mklabel msdos

• Create the root partition on the SD card:

  # parted /dev/sdc -- mkpart primary 1MiB 100%

• Create the swap partition on the internal drive:

  # parted /dev/sda -- mkpart primary linux-swap 1MiB 100%

As per section 2.2.3 Formatting we now format the drives appropriately.

• Format and label the / partition:

  # mkfs.ext4 -L nixos /dev/sdc1

• Format the swap partion:

  # mkswap -L swap /dev/sda1

Installation and Configuration:

Now you can just continue to follow section 2.3 Installing and configure the system as you desire. I initially use a bare bones install and it can be read here. It's worth taking a brief look at if you're new to NixOS.

The section worth copying is related to how the kernel uses memory on this old i386 system:

  nixpkgs.config = {
    packageOverrides = pkgs: {
      stdenv = pkgs.stdenv // {
        platform = pkgs.stdenv.platform // {
          kernelExtraConfig = ''
            HIGHMEM64G? n  # 32-bit proc with > 4G RAM
            HIGHMEM4G y # 32-bit # proc # with # =< # 4G # RAM
          '';
        };
      };
    };
  };

Do not copy my import of retro-gaming.nix, that's a for after a successful install and a future blog post.

Once you've completed the install, the EeePC 701 ought to reboot into NixOS successfully.