Skip to content
Athena OS

Installing over NixOS

The following section will guide you through the steps to install Athena OS on top of NixOS. This section is useful for those cases where by using Athena OS ISO the system is not installed correctly.

Install Athena OS over NixOS

Get the latest stable NixOS ISO from the official NixOS website and install it by following the NixOS Installation manual. For an easy post-configuration, use a UEFI system.

Once the installation has been ended, reboot the system and land in your NixOS environment.

Open terminal and run:

Terminal window
sudo nix-channel --remove nixos
sudo nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-unstable nixos
sudo nix-channel --add https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/archive/master.tar.gz home-manager
sudo nix-channel --update
nix-shell -p git
git clone https://github.com/Athena-OS/athena-nix
cd athena-nix/nixos
sudo cp -rf home-manager hosts modules pkgs configuration.nix default.nix /etc/nixos/

Then, edit the file /etc/nixos/configuration.nix to set your favourite choices for Athena configuration, for example:

  username = "athena"; # Change it by your favourite username
  hashed = "$6$zjvJDfGSC93t8SIW$AHhNB.vDDPMoiZEG3Mv6UYvgUY6eya2UY5E2XA1lF7mOg6nHXUaaBmJYAMMQhvQcA54HJSLdkJ/zdy8UKX3xL1"; # The shown password hash is 'athena'. To set your password, change it by opening the terminal and run 'openssl passwd -6 "yourpassword"' and replace the result inside it to set the password of your user account
  hashedRoot = "$6$zjvJDfGSC93t8SIW$AHhNB.vDDPMoiZEG3Mv6UYvgUY6eya2UY5E2XA1lF7mOg6nHXUaaBmJYAMMQhvQcA54HJSLdkJ/zdy8UKX3xL1"; # The shown password hash is 'athena'. To set your password, change it by opening the terminal and run 'openssl passwd -6 "yourpassword"' and replace the result inside it to set the password of your root account
  hostname = "athenaos"; # Change it by your favourite hostname
  theme = "temple"; # You can choose between: akame, cyborg, graphite, hackthebox, samurai, sweet, temple
  desktop = "gnome"; # You can choose between: cinnamon, gnome, mate
  dmanager = "gdm"; # You can choose between: gdm, lightdm
  shell = "fish"; # You can choose between: bash, fish, zsh
  terminal = "kitty"; # You can choose between: alacritty, kitty
  browser = "firefox"; # Only firefox is available

Save configuration.nix and run:

sudo nixos-rebuild switch

If you get a black screen with blanking cursor, it could occur due to the switching to a different display manager. In this case, reboot your computer and run again sudo nixos-rebuild switch.

Instead, if you get at the end an error like Failed to start Home Manager environment for athena, run:

journalctl -xeu home-manager-athena.service

You will access to the journalctl logs where you can find a string containing Existing file.... Remove the mentioned files and finally run again sudo nixos-rebuild switch.

After the switch command is successfully ended, reboot your system.