We love it when members of the Holochain Community take initiative and share what they’ve learned. Vibrant groups of people who are willing to teach one another how to get the most out of Holochain is something we believe in deeply and support on the Holochain Forum. So we’ve been delighted to see that Holochain community member, Sven @newprometheus, has put together a guide for installing NixOS from an external hard drive.

You can find installation guides for NixOS all over the web, but it’s especially good to have information created by someone within our community, written specifically for how NixOS fits within the Holochain ecosystem. Recall that our OS for HoloPorts is a customized build of NixOS, with a standard set of configurations (Holonix) designed to handle stuff that’s peculiar to HoloPorts (e.g., compiling hApps to WASM). Whether you’re in development or testing, you’ll want to know how to get NixOS set up so that it provides a consistent experience in terms of communicating between peers. This guide does just that.

Additionally, this great guide is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It walks you through @newprometheus’s own experience getting the NixOS installer set up on an external hard drive, managing partitions, tweaking the configuration settings, and running an installation. It also acknowledges that everyone will most likely have to adapt it to meet their own needs. Even so, you’ll learn a lot about how the NixOS installation process works when you read this guide.

We encourage you to check the guide out! More importantly, we want you to help answer questions and fulfill requests from the community. Whether it’s a how-to guide like this one, new code, bug fixes, or other resources; if you see something the community needs that hasn’t been addressed yet, we welcome your input. Feel free to share resources on the forum and/or submit a pull request for further consideration.  Learn, connect, and collaborate on the Holochain Forum.