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+title: "Installing Graphene from NixOS"
+date: 2024-09-05T08:58:55-05:00
+draft: false
+---
+I just got a new Pixel device from the [Pixel 9](https://store.google.com/us/product/pixel_9?hl=en-US) family. While
+I enjoy the device so far, I don't want to talk so much about the device here. One of the first things I did with the
+device was install [GrapheneOS](https://grapheneos.org/) onto it for enhanced privacy and security from the spying
+eyes of the public corporate overlords who want to harvest data for their advertisers. It's obviously a great
+business model for them, but I don't really want to be part of it any more than I am required to be.
+
+As a user of all [NixOS](https://nixos.org/) systems for my personal compute, I was looking for how to install Graphene onto
+my device. Graphene offers a great web installer that you can click through on their site and follow some very
+simple instructions. But if you are a Linux user, you need to prep the system a bit. Exactly how to prep your
+system is left a bit nebulous as there might be different ways to do that in different Linux distributions. So here
+are the steps I took took to get NixOS ready to run the system.
+
+## Install necessary software
+
+There are a few pieces of Android-related software that I needed to configure. Firstly, I needed to install and
+enable the ADB tools, and I needed to give my user access to leverage those tools. In my system configuration
+I had to enable the following lines to accomplish that:
+
+```nix
+{
+    programs.adb.enable = true;
+    users.users.greg.extraGroups = [ "adbusers" "kvm" ];
+}
+```
+
+I am not completely sure that the "kvm" group was necessary here. That might only be necessary if you are doing
+Android development from your system. But I also have KVM installed on my system already for other work that I
+do, and some guides for other distros suggested KVM group for ADB usage. So I added it here. It doesn't seem to
+hurt anything.
+
+Once you have enabled the necessary software, rebuild your system.
+
+## Run the necessary software
+
+Either login to a new environment to enable the groups, or activate them in your favorite way. Then launch your
+browser. I use Firefox, but the GrapheneOS installer is recommended to run in Blink-based browsers (those based
+on the Chrome/Chromium world). So I don't usually have those installed, but with Nix that's not a problem. All I
+needed to do in order to launch one was
+
+```
+nix run "nixpkgs#chromium"
+```
+
+Chromium launched right up, and I was able to navigate to the GrapheneOS web installer. Before making the above
+changes, launching Chromium was giving me errors about the WebUSB not being able to detect my phone due to lack
+of drivers and permissions.
+
+## Troubleshooting?
+
+Even with the above my phone still was not being detected by the installer. Eventually, at my wit's end, I fired
+up `lsusb` on the command line and found that the phone was not registering at all with the OS. Swapping from
+an older cable to the USB-C cable that came with the phone fixed that. So I'm suspecing that the first cable I tried
+to use was maybe a charging-only cable as that is all I have used it for in the past.
+
+Hope this helps someone else who wants to install GrapheneOS but is using NixOS on your host! Happy FOSSing!