Setting up a Win 11 VM on NixOS

Today, I just wanted to try how easy it would be to have a Windows VM on NixOS.

I ran into two issues, both of which there thankfully were Github threads about.

This is what you need to do to get Windows 11 running on NixOS:

nix shell nixpkgs#quickemu
quickget windows 11
# then, comment out the fixed_iso line in windows-11.conf
nvim windows-11.conf
# Then, you can run the VM
quickemu --vm windows-11.conf --extra_args "--drive media=cdrom,index=3,file=windows-11/virtio-win.iso"

But after booting, it doesn’t find a disk to install windows to.

For that, we need to have drivers, which we can find in E:\amd64\viostor\w11\. Select that folder, and from there, viostor.inf.

With that done, the Windows installer finds a disk.

That lets the installation succeed.

After being in Win 11, you probably want internet/other drivers—for that, you can go to File Explorer -> virtio-win CD and run virtio-win-gt-x64.

With that, you’re set :)