So I’ve been recently made aware of Void Linux and decided to give it a go while I’m distro shopping to leave *buntu behind.
I downloaded the ISO and tried to install it in a VM. Ohohoho boy this is not as user friendly as other distros. I’m really glad I have 25 years of experience under the belt.
Instead of just using the void-installer with the TUI and mostly default options, I tried installing it the way I would if it was my PC. So I had to go the advance route.
Thankfully there is really well written documentation to help you along with the process. (See here) Essentially you do everything by hand. Partition your disk with fdisk, create your filesystem with mkfs, and when you’re ready, you launch the base installer (essentially the equivalent of a debootstrap if you’re coming from a Debian background) to install a base system. Then you chroot into your drive and edit your configs, install packages, etc.
So the setup I did was to create a disk with a BTRFS partition, uing subvolumes like @, @home, @var, @tmp, @swap, @snapshot for the root, home directories, /var, /tmp, /swap and /.snapshots where the snapshots would be stored. I mounted my subvolumes in /mnt and “debotstrapped” my disk.
Then I chrooted into it and edited some basic /etc configs like locale and hostname, set timezones. Changed the root password, created a user and set its password, added the user to the wheel and cdrom groups and edited the sudoers file to allow users from the wheel group to execute passwordless sudo commands. Add the dhcpd service to /var/services, etc. I just followed the guide so far.
Then I got in the meat of it. My objective was to have a KDE Plasma desktop with Wayland with a login manager. That’s when things got a bit complicated. The guide isn’t really clear on what you need to have a wayland graphical system. I skipped the video card drivers part because I’m in a VM. But the instructions on intalling wayland weren’t very clear on what packages were required. Installing a session manager like SDDM wasn’t very clear either. Installing a base KDE Plasma destop was easy though. It’s just a couple of meta-packages.
But yeah, luckily I found other online documentation. Like this straightforward video on how to install a basic KDE Plasma desktop system. I didn’t understand why they installed X11 though. I wanted a Wayland system. But it turns out that SDDM, the QT based login manager that’s meant to use with KDE (Though not mandatory) requires it! I also needed some stuff like D-Bus and elogind.
So far I’ve been able to get a graphical KDE Plasma desktop going. But I still ain’t got sound. I’m pretty sure I installed the Pipewire package. Do I need anything else?
Also, I can’t for the life of me create a god damn swap file. I didn’t create a swap partition because I wanted to use a more practical swap file. I created the file using
sudo btrfs filesystem mkswapfile --size 4g /swap/swapfile
But to no avail. The sytem even crashes and the file system is remounted in read-only.
If anyone have any clues on how to set up these two things, I’d really appreciate it.
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Your swapfile setup seems to be very similar to what I do on most systems. I installed void in a similar fashion as what you described (I’ve been meaning to try out void anyway), and swapfile is working for me.
By the system crashes, do you mean while booting, or when you try to activate swap manually, or something else? Could you provide your bootloader configuration and /etc/fstab ? I believe the swapfile line should follow the
@swapsubvolume mount line.Here is mine, for example:
UUID=Y0LOY0LO-Y0LO-Y0LO-Y0LO-Y0LOY0LOY0LO /swap btrfs rw,discard=async,space_cache=v2,subvol=/@swap 0 0 /swap/swapfile1 none swap defaults 0 0Also, curious why use a
@tmpsubvolume instead of tmpfs? Are you putting large files there?On a side note, your installation of Void reminded me of my very first archlinux experience back when ‘archinstall’ wasn’t a thing yet.
You probably shouldn’t use btrfs for swap unless you understand the heavy limitations on doing so. For starters, you didn’t disable CoW when creating, so I’m assuming you don’t know the issues involved.
Aside from that, I can say Void is still pretty Alpha, regardless of the claims. I messed with a bit just to see if it was worth it for single-purpose use-cases (they make this claim), and it’s just not there, unfortunately. I believe they aim to be a rock-solid alternative to Alpine with a more simple interface, but as you noted, they are nowhere there.
I also had a TON of issues with XBPS, and they need some serious work there. Duplicate packages, update issues, orphaned packages…etc. If they are serious, they need to put more effort into improvements, and also communicating the actual status of their project. Seems they are currently failing in both regards.
I think you still need to add an entry for it in fstab as well.
Well, no I wasn’t.
But according to the documentation I did everything right. It’s running on a VM, so it’s single drive, single partition, it’s on its own subvolume for the pupose of not taking snapshots of that subvolume. It’s preallocated and created using the btrfs filesystem mkswapfile command, and I’m assuming this command takes care of the NODATACOW NODATASUM stuff.
What are the limitations of BTRFS swap files?
Thank you.
But it turns out that SDDM, the QT based login manager that’s meant to use with KDE
SDDM is Plasma’s “old” login manager. They phased it out in favor of the new Plasma login manager a few months ago. I don’t know how recent Void’s packages are, but I think I remember it being a rolling release, right? On CachyOS the switch was a few months ago.
Void Linux is a non-systemd distro. plasma-login-manager is systemd dependent.
Oh shit, didn’t know that, thanks. :(
Oh interesting. I really hope future software won’t be so dependent on systemd in the future.
Its a rolling release but not updates as soon as theyre available upstream like most rolling releases. I believe its to keep things stable in spite of the rolling release model
Not sure how far behind they might be but its super easy to search packages online that are available to install through xbps if you have the package name
Edit: here’s the repo search https://voidlinux.org/packages/
That would be on me. I wasn’t aware of a new months old login manager.
That’s why I told you. :) Sorry that it won’t help you because of systemd dependence.
Yeah that kinda sucks though. That dependency shouldn’t exist. I’m starting to understand the hate for systemd.
Absolutely. I was also thinking about trying a non-systemd distro. But I fear I’m not yet ready to hop into a system that I have to configure myself from the bottom up. If there was a well-configured “out-of-the-box” distro like Mint or CachyOS based on Devuan, Artix or Void, that would be so great.
Hey so I’m installing Devuan as we speak and it’s the same process as Debian so far.
It’s honestly not that hard, especially with the live cd installer. Have you tried it yourself? What was it about Devuan that appeared difficult?
Oh, I tried Debian several times and it’s so much harder than CachyOS, especially concerning package availability. If Debian gave me headaches, Devuan will not be better, right? ^^
It’s definitely a me issue, but just to elaborate: A lot of stuff that’s in the CachyOS standard repos isn’t even available in Debian’s repos (and therefore probably the same is true for Devuan), so you have to add additional repos or compile from source (examples I ran into: julia programming language, Niri window manager, Noctalia “shell” (in the sense of a graphical desktop environment, it’s not a terminal emulator)). Don’t get me wrong, I can of course follow guides to get things done or settle for another software… But when I follow guides to force non-available software into Debian, I often have the feeling that I risk breaking things in the long term (e.g., how should I do updates of the stuff I compiled from source?) because I don’t really know that much about the system. Right now, sadly, I don’t have the energy to learn all of that. :'(
Huh. This is the first time I hear about Devuan. I thought it was an autocorrect error or a typo lol!
That’s interesting. I guess I’ll be trying out another distro.
Are they using the same repos as Debian? Or are they rebuilding the packages to avoid systemd dependency?
Oh, sorry for the late answer. I use a mobile client without notifications. ^^ From your other answer it seems you probably already know more than I do. ;)
Afaik they have their own repos but because of there being fewer people working on it, they often drop packages with systemd dependence instead of patching them, correct?
Curious, but have you tried the TUI? If so, what does it lack for your usecase?
Yeah I tried it at first.
But it doesn’t even create subvolumes on a BTRFS partition. Not even a single @rootfs or something like other installers do.
So I had no choice but to go the manual way. And honestly if you follow the guide, you’re gonna get the same results in the end but slightly more adapted to your needs.
I thought it had something to do with BTRFS subvolumes, but I wasn’t sure. I’m guessing the TUI doesn’t cover them since Void’s developers didn’t think TUI users would be interested in creating them, but I can’t imagine it’d be hard for them to add support for.
