I copied the bulk of this guide from Andrew Miller's NixOS-On-Linode.md instructions. It's a very well-written guide, but I felt we could make things a bit more simple than he left them in his original guide.
This tutorial is written for people who want to run NixOS on a Linode instance. The installation is pretty straightforward, but it involves some bootstrapping using Linode's tools.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to set up NixOS on Linode by setting up disks (including the installation live CD) using the rescue OS, and use the minimal live CD to install NixOS onto your disk.