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Comment on Persistent packages on Steam Deck using Nix

And if anyone’s interested in what prompted the writing of this guide, I wanted to play Palworld but didn’t know the IP address of the local PC my server is on. I was also really lazy to get the IP address from the PC itself, so I decided to use nmap to scan my local network and find the PC that way. Found out nmap is not installed by default so I had to install it somehow and then I remembered that SteamOS added the /nix directory to its exceptions that survive across upgrades.

In short, instead of taking two minutes to get the IP address I spent over half an hour getting nix to work. And decided to share in case it helps others.

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filister@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
One comment though, you are moving the bashrc and bash_profile instead of copying it. So consider fixing it in your instructions.

You could have also run a for loop and ping all the IPs in your subnet. Something like this will work:

for i in {1..254}; do ping -c 1 -W 1 192.168.1.$i &> /dev/null && echo 192.168.1.$i; done

Presuming that your subnet is 192.168.1.0/24. This command will loop through all the IPs in this network and only print the one that are alive.

I didn’t know that Steam have added an exception for /nix which is pretty cool. Thanks for sharing
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- rikudou@lemmings.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  The move is intentional, the configuration file I included makes Home Manager manage .bashrc and .bash_profile, the original files are moved for backup.
  
  Ping wouldn’t help that much, there’s around ~30 devices on my network. And it’s very much possible my PC blocks ICMP. And in addition, nmap includes the manufacturer in the output which is what I wanted to base my guess on.
  
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  - filister@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I am pretty sure your PC doesn’t block ICMP requests and you can get the MAC address of the IP address using the arp command and then check the first three octets against the MAC vendors database.
    
    This is all possible in Bash but the script will be slightly more complicated and will involve three different tools, ping, arp, curl.
    
    But I am sure you know how to check your PC IP address anyway.
    
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Badland9085@lemm.ee [bot] ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Sounds like a classic case of early onset yak-shaving. But given that I too get bitten by this bug from time to time, I approve.

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