New to Holo attempting to install holochain on Catalina

New to Holo attempting to install holochain on Catalina. Of course I’m running into the read/only file system error. Does anyone know when this will be resolved or if there is an "easy’ work around. Any help that could be provided would be appreciated.

Jaclyn Horton
Soulfire
Berkeley, Ca

I also ran into this issue earlier this week when I upgraded my MacOS.

The issue has been adressed in the forums.

And here’s a direct link to the fix.

Hope this helps.

1 Like
sudo diskutil apfs addVolume disk1 APFSX Nix -mountpoint /nix
Error: -69842: Couldn't mount disk

In the step before that, it says:
" If not, run echo 'nix' | sudo tee -a /etc/synthetic.conf then reboot."

you prbly missed the reboot instruction? I know it’s a bit unusual, but you actually have to restart your whole computer, then proceed.

I did reboot, disk utility, as a verification shows /volumes /nix as writable, I ran the installer in daemon mode, seemed like it was going along nice but at the end still got the same r/w error. I noticed it did try to mkdir the /nix disk even though it was already corrected.

sh <(curl https://nixos.org/nix/install) --daemon

sudo mkdir -pv -m 0755 /nix /nix/var /nix/var/log /nix/var/log/nix /nix/var/log/nix/drvs /nix/var/nix /nix/var/nix/db /nix/var/nix/gcroots /nix/var/nix/profiles /nix/var/nix/temproots /nix/var/nix/userpool /nix/var/nix/gcroots/per-user /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user

to make the basic directory structure of Nix (part 1)

mkdir: /nix: Read-only file system

mkdir: /nix/var: Read-only file system

mkdir: /nix/var/log: Read-only file system

mkdir: /nix/var/log/nix: Read-only file system

mkdir: /nix/var/log/nix/drvs: Read-only file system

mkdir: /nix/var/nix: Read-only file system

mkdir: /nix/var/nix/db: Read-only file system

mkdir: /nix/var/nix/gcroots: Read-only file system

mkdir: /nix/var/nix/profiles: Read-only file system

mkdir: /nix/var/nix/temproots: Read-only file system

mkdir: /nix/var/nix/userpool: Read-only file system

mkdir: /nix/var/nix/gcroots/per-user: Read-only file system

mkdir: /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user: Read-only file system

Volume name : Nix
Volume type : APFS Volume
BSD device node : disk1s6
Mount point : /Volumes/Nix
File system : APFS (Case-sensitive)
Connection : SATA
Device tree path : IODeviceTree:/PCI0@0/SATA@1F,2/PRT0@0/PMP@0
Writable : Yes
Is case-sensitive : Yes
File system UUID : 045924F4-12BA-4D27-A6D9-AA2A5E8119FC
Volume capacity : 499,898,105,856
Available space (Purgeable + Free) : 386,156,779,517
Purgeable space : 10,035,435,517
Free space : 376,121,344,000

I think I did the same misstep of running the installer in daemon mode at some point.

So what I did is that I uninstalled nix.

Then I ran echo 'nix' | sudo tee -a /etc/synthetic.conf

and rebooted.

I then followed step 2 described in the aforementioned fix:

sudo diskutil apfs addVolume disk1 APFSX Nix -mountpoint /nix
sudo diskutil enableOwnership /nix
sudo chflags hidden /nix  # Don't show the Nix volume on the desktop
echo "LABEL=Nix /nix apfs rw" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

and finally installed the Nix Package Manager as indicated here (Holochain Install) instead of running the installer in daemon mode.