I retired my MBA 2010 around five years or so ago. The battery bulged and it was on a shelf for a while. Then I replaced the battery and the wifi was all kinds of flaky. In a fit of frustration I removed the wifi card and made use of dongles, but ended up migrating to a thinkpad x200 tablet. It was fun to have something new that was fully working and my MBA didn't get much use. Nearly the same hardware, except no more finicky nvidia drivers to fight with.

Earlier this year I put NixOS on it and set about trying to find an internal NIC, but after a series of returned NICs that claimed to be the right spec but didn't fit, I stopped trying. Another issue it faced was a super slow boot up. It would sit between stage 1 and stage 2 for a long time while booting NixOS.

I couldn't even find a gap in time in the boot logs either. It was hard to debug. But I gave up on it. Within the last few days, I booted coreboot on an i7 x220 and I set about installing NixOS. I grabbed my trusty ventoy thumb drive and coreboot wouldn't even make the attempt to boot it.

I dd-ed the target ISO over the thumbdrive and it booted just fine. And wow was the boot speed nice on there! I dusted off the MBA and redid the NixOS install on there and the mysterious hang between stage1 and stage2 was fixed.

It would seem that Ventoy was using a MBR instead of GPT partition scheme. This resulted in either Legacy BIOS installs of NixOS or in grub doing some magic to boot UEFI from legacy. Still need to nail this down. But my systems are doing much better in regular UEFI and not legacy booting.

Tags: journal

created: 2025-05-18

(re)generated: 2026-07-17