Open Voice Operating System - NixOS Edition

A bootable Raspberry PI image for the OpenVoice OS built and configured with NixOS. Every build is reproducible and easily configured. Powered by OpenVoiceOS/ovos-docker

Quickstart

Download latest sd-card image: https://github.com/Ramblurr/ovos-rpi-nixos/releases
Flash, plug in network cable, and boot
SSH into raspberry pi (it uses DHCP)
- user: ovos password: ovos
Watch systemctl status ovos-image-preload until it says it has pulled all the container images
sudo podman ps to check if all the containers are running

Build it Yourself

While I make a ready-to-go image available, you should really customize and build yourself a OVOS image that is suited to your needs.

That's where the real power of this project comes from.

Prereqs:

docker > 20.10
- You can use podman as the backend (with the socket), but docker compose is required. If you want to do that I assume you know how to tweak your environment to make that possible

Build platforms tested:

x86_64 Linux

Configure:

Copy config/user-config-example.nix to config/user-config.nix
Edit it and change the variables there to customize your image.

Build:

$ sudo ./build.sh
# sudo is required when building with docker
# after some time your image will be in the current directory: ovos-nix-sd-image-aarch64-linux.img

Or if you run NixOS yourself, just use nix-build.sh to skip the docker build stuff.

Test (optional)

Optionally test the image in a qemu VM with:

python scripts/test-image.py --timeout 0 ovos-nix-sd-image-aarch64-linux.img

Once the virtual machine boots you can ssh into it with ssh -p 5555 ovos@localhost

Run:

Flash the image ovos-nix-sd-image-aarch64-linux.img to an sd card using your favorite method
- I use sudo dd if=ovos-nix-sd-image-aarch64-linux.img of=/dev/YOUR_SD_CARD bs=64K status=progress
Put it in your RPI and boot
It will use use DHCP to connect to the network

Access:

ssh ovos@<IP>
systemctl status ovos-image-preload
systemctl status pod_ovos
systemctl status ovos_messagebus
systemctl status ovos_core

Note: on the first boot all the images will have to be pulled, which can take awhile on raspberry pi hardware. ovos-image-preload.service is responsible for that.

Update:

You want to tweak your config but don't want to build and flash an image every time?

Well you're in luck. You can use the exact same configuration you used to build the image to reconfigure it live.

SSH into your OVOS device
Edit your nix configuration, you can find it in /etc/nixos/user-config.nix
After editing your config, update with: sudo nixos-rebuild switch
Boom.

Roadmap

Why?

I have been running several Mycroft instances at home for awhile now. They have always been installed and configured with some custom Ansible playbooks. Lately I've fallen out of love with Ansible as a way to configure machines. NixOS provides a powerful declarative method for defining what an operating system image should look like. I've started using it on my workstations and other servers over the past year.

Recently I decided it was time to migrate from the dying (dead?) Mycroft lineage to OpenVoiceOS (OVOS), the project picking up where Mycroft left off.

Opening my Ansible playbooks and looking at the task of refactoring them to OVOS just filled me with dread.

As of this time (August 2023) OVOS doesn't have easily built images, users are more or less expected to cobble together the system themselves (like with raspbian-ovos or custom Ansible), or use Neon OS. I like the community and hacker DIY attiude of OVOS, so I want to stick with it.

But I needed a way to reproducibly build, manage, and maintain 4 separate OVOS instances that didn't drive me nuts.

Here we are now: OVOS running on NixOS.

Well, OVOS running in podman containers running on NixOS (because packaging all those python modules for NixOS so they don't have to run in containers, does not sound like fun).

Many thanks to goldyfruit for his work creating all the container definitions for OpenVoiceOS/ovos-docker.

Alternatives :

OVOS Buildroot - An off the shelf linux distro for OVOS. Difficult to build by yourself and difficult to find recent up to date images.
Raspbian OVOS (formerly known as picroft) - Designed to be installed ontop of a base Rasbpian install.
Neon AI

License

This software is licensed under the GNU AGPL v3.0 or later.

ovos-rpi-nixos
Copyright (C) 2023 Casey Link

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Sources

NixOS Docker-based SD image builder by Robertof

Ramblurr/ovos-rpi-nixos