Clean up the installation section; document the generic binary tarballs

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Eelco Dolstra 2012-05-24 12:04:07 -04:00
parent 0301525e6c
commit 8058dab26e

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@ -40,11 +40,155 @@ platforms as well.</para>
</section>
<section><title>Obtaining Nix</title>
<section><title>Installing a binary distribution</title>
<para>The easiest way to obtain Nix is to download a <link
xlink:href="http://nixos.org/">source distribution</link>. RPMs
for Red Hat, SuSE, and Fedora Core are also available.</para>
<para>The easiest way to install Nix is to use a binary package.
Binary packages of the latest stable release are available for Fedora,
Debian, Ubuntu, Mac OS X and various other systems from the <link
xlink:href="http://nixos.org/nix/download.html">Nix homepage</link>.
You can also get builds of the latest development release from our
<link
xlink:href="http://hydra.nixos.org/view/nix/trunk/latest">continuous
build system</link>.</para>
<para>For Fedora, RPM packages are available. These can be installed
or upgraded using <command>rpm -U</command>. For example,
<screen>
$ rpm -U nix-1.0-1.i386.rpm</screen>
</para>
<para>For Debian and Ubuntu, you can download a Deb package and
install it like this:
<screen>
$ dpkg -i nix_1.0-1_amd64.deb</screen>
</para>
<para>For other platforms, including Mac OS X (Darwin), FreeBSD and
other Linux distributions, you can download a binary tarball. It
contains Nix and all its dependencies. You should unpack it in the
root directory, then run <command>nix-finish-install</command>:
<screen>
$ cd /
$ tar xfj nix-1.1-x86_64-darwin.tar.bz2
$ nix-finish-install
</screen>
After this you can delete
<filename>/usr/bin/nix-finish-install</filename>.</para>
<para>If you plan to use Nix from a single non-root user account, its
probably convenient to change the ownership of the entire Nix store
and database to that user account. In that case, install as follows:
<screen>
alice$ cd /
alice$ sudo tar xfj nix-1.1-x86_64-darwin.tar.bz2
alice$ sudo chown -R alice /nix
alice$ nix-finish-install
</screen>
</para>
<para>Nix can be uninstalled using <command>rpm -e nix</command> or
<command>dpkg -r nix</command> on RPM- and Dpkg-based systems,
respectively. After this you should manually remove the Nix store and
other auxiliary data, if desired:
<screen>
$ rm -rf /nix</screen>
</para>
</section>
<section><title>Installing Nix from source</title>
<para>If no binary package is available, you can download and compile
a source distribution.</para>
<section><title>Prerequisites</title>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>A fairly recent version of GCC/G++. Version 2.95
and higher should work. Clang will also work.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>Perl 5.8 or higher.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para><command>pkg-config</command> to locate
dependencies. If your distribution does not provide it, you can get
it from <link
xlink:href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/pkg-config"
/>.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>The bzip2 compressor program and the
<literal>libbz2</literal> library. Thus you must have bzip2
installed, including development headers and libraries. If your
distribution does not provide these, you can obtain bzip2 from <link
xlink:href="http://www.bzip.org/"/>.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>The SQLite embedded database library, version 3.6.19
or higher. If your distribution does not provide it, please install
it from <link xlink:href="http://www.sqlite.org/" />.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>The Perl DBI and DBD::SQLite libraries, which are
available from <link
xlink:href="http://search.cpan.org/">CPAN</link> if your
distribution does not provide them.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>The <link
xlink:href="http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/">Boehm
garbage collector</link> to reduce the evaluators memory
consumption (optional). To enable it, install
<literal>pkgconfig</literal> and the Boehm garbage collector, and
pass the flag <option>--enable-gc</option> to
<command>configure</command>.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>The <command>xmllint</command> and
<command>xsltproc</command> programs to build this manual and the
man-pages. These are part of the <literal>libxml2</literal> and
<literal>libxslt</literal> packages, respectively. You also need
the <link
xlink:href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/projects/xsl/">DocBook
XSL stylesheets</link> and optionally the <link
xlink:href="http://www.docbook.org/schemas/5x"> DocBook 5.0 RELAX NG
schemas</link>. Note that these are only required if you modify the
manual sources or when you are building from the Git
repository.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>Recent versions of Bison and Flex to build the
parser. (This is because Nix needs GLR support in Bison and
reentrancy support in Flex.) For Bison, you need version 2.3 or
higher (1.875 does <emphasis>not</emphasis> work), which can be
obtained from the <link
xlink:href="ftp://alpha.gnu.org/pub/gnu/bison">GNU FTP
server</link>. For Flex, you need version 2.5.33, which is
available on <link
xlink:href="http://lex.sourceforge.net/">SourceForge</link>.
Slightly older versions may also work, but ancient versions like the
ubiquitous 2.5.4a won't. Note that these are only required if you
modify the parser or when you are building from the Git
repository.</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</section>
<section><title>Obtaining a source distribution</title>
<para>The source tarball of the most recent stable release can be
downloaded from the <link
xlink:href="http://nixos.org/nix/download.html">Nix homepage</link>.
You can also grab the <link
xlink:href="http://hydra.nixos.org/view/nix/trunk/latest/tarball/download-by-type/file/source-dist">most
recent development release</link>.</para>
<para>Alternatively, the most recent sources of Nix can be obtained
from its <link
@ -63,71 +207,6 @@ repository.</para>
</section>
<section><title>Prerequisites</title>
<para><emphasis>The following prerequisites only apply when you build
from source</emphasis>. Binary releases (e.g., RPMs) have no
prerequisites.</para>
<para>A fairly recent version of GCC/G++ is required. Version 2.95
and higher should work. Clang will also work.</para>
<para>Nix requires Perl, version 5.8 or higher.</para>
<para>Nix requires <command>pkg-config</command> to locate its
dependencies. If your distribution does not provide it, you can get
it from <link
xlink:href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/pkg-config"
/>.</para>
<para>Nix requires the bzip2 compressor program and the
<literal>libbz2</literal> library. Thus you must have bzip2
installed, including development headers and libraries. If your
distribution does not provide these, you can obtain bzip2 from <link
xlink:href="http://www.bzip.org/"/>.</para>
<para>Nix requires the SQLite embedded database library, version
3.6.19 or higher. If your distribution does not provide it, please
install it from <link xlink:href="http://www.sqlite.org/" />.</para>
<para>Nix requires the Perl DBI and DBD::SQLite libraries, which are
available from <link xlink:href="http://search.cpan.org/">CPAN</link>
if your distribution does not provide them.</para>
<para>Nix can optionally use the <link
xlink:href="http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/">Boehm
garbage collector</link> to reduce the evaluators memory consumption.
To enable it, install <literal>pkgconfig</literal> and the Boehm
garbage collector, and pass the flag <option>--enable-gc</option> to
<command>configure</command>.</para>
<para>To build this manual and the man-pages you need the
<command>xmllint</command> and <command>xsltproc</command> programs,
which are part of the <literal>libxml2</literal> and
<literal>libxslt</literal> packages, respectively. You also need the
<link
xlink:href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/projects/xsl/">DocBook XSL
stylesheets</link> and optionally the <link
xlink:href="http://www.docbook.org/schemas/5x"> DocBook 5.0 RELAX NG
schemas</link>. Note that these are only required if you modify the
manual sources or when you are building from the Git
repository.</para>
<para>To build the parser, very <emphasis>recent</emphasis> versions
of Bison and Flex are required. (This is because Nix needs GLR
support in Bison and reentrancy support in Flex.) For Bison, you need
version 2.3 or higher (1.875 does <emphasis>not</emphasis> work),
which can be obtained from the <link
xlink:href="ftp://alpha.gnu.org/pub/gnu/bison">GNU FTP server</link>.
For Flex, you need version 2.5.33, which is available on <link
xlink:href="http://lex.sourceforge.net/">SourceForge</link>. Slightly
older versions may also work, but ancient versions like the ubiquitous
2.5.4a won't. Note that these are only required if you modify the
parser or when you are building from the Git repository.</para>
</section>
<section><title>Building Nix from source</title>
<para>After unpacking or checking out the Nix sources, issue the
@ -180,33 +259,6 @@ options.</para>
</section>
<section><title>Installing a binary distribution</title>
<para>RPM and Deb packages of Nix for a number of different versions
of Fedora, openSUSE, Debian and Ubuntu can be downloaded from <link
xlink:href="http://nixos.org/" />. Once downloaded, the RPMs can be
installed or upgraded using <command>rpm -U</command>. For example,
<screen>
$ rpm -U nix-0.13pre18104-1.i386.rpm</screen>
Likewise, for a Deb package:
<screen>
$ dpkg -i nix_0.13pre18104-1_amd64.deb</screen>
</para>
<para>Nix can be uninstalled using <command>rpm -e nix</command> or
<command>dpkg -r nix</command>. After this you should manually remove
the Nix store and other auxiliary data, if desired:
<screen>
$ rm -rf /nix/store
$ rm -rf /nix/var</screen>
</para>
</section>