Network Manager calls dhclient on container interfaces and fails which locks you out of the container after a few seconds, unless you tell it not to manage these interfaces.
To build the manual, you need Nix installed on your system (no need
for NixOS). To install Nix, follow the instructions at
https://nixos.org/nix/download.html
When you have Nix on your system, in the root directory of the project
(i.e., `nixpkgs`), run:
nix-build nixos/release.nix -A manual.x86_64-linux
When this command successfully finishes, it will tell you where the
manual got generated.