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This discussion article is to cover the usage, internals and configuration of the Nix package manager.

Nix on Linux

Install Nix for a single user

To install Nix from any Linux distribution, use the following two commands (assumes you have the permission to use sudo and you are logged in as the user you want to install Nix for).

sudo install -d -m755 -o $USER -g $USER /nix
curl https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh

After that being done, you can use all Nix commands as a normal user without any special permissions (for example by using sudo)

Common Errors

Bad configuration option: gssapikexalgorithms

Found when using an SSH binary from Nix on typically RPM-based distros like CentOS, Fedora, Scientific Linux, Redhat, etc. The quick fix: Just comment out the configuration option in the ssh config file, you probably don't need it.