Without systemd? Shut Up And Take My Money!
Void Linux: Into the Void
61–70 of 104 posts
Re: Void Linux: Into the Void
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who switched from Slackware to Void several months ago, Void boots far faster. Also, though I haven't used Arch, Void really feels like a combination of a slimmed down Slackware + NetBSD (the author of Void is a NetBSD commiter IIRC). Of course, Gentoo portage was inspired by BSD ports, which I believe was an impetus for Arch's package manager. I don't know what the story is for Arch, but I find that Void…
Our initial author, and the primary author of xbps, came directly from the NetBSD community.
Installed on an old Thinkpad X61s from the xfce4 live .iso (Ran the installer script from a terminal in the live session - result is an ncurses dialogue that walks you through the steps. Disk already partitioned and skipped the network set-up stage and selected install from local. Rebooted into (graphical, xfce4) installed system in a few minutes. Network manager up and running, needed to log-in to local wifi again.
Probably because I skipped the network stage in the installer, I needed to set a repository for updates.
echo 'repository=http://repo.voidlinux.eu/current/' \ >
/etc/xbps.d/00-repository-main.conf
Now installing some applications. LibreOffice is version 6 'fresh'. A bit like OpenBSD, installing Libreoffice brings a metric tonne of dependencies.
Edit: you need to install alsa to get sound
xbps-install alsa-utils
Re: Void Linux: Into the Void
#63I usually refrain from distro- (and editor-, and language-) related discussions but I think Void Linux deserves an exception here: - Everything is remarkably simple, (mostly) well-documented and straightforward. - Friendly, dedicated and very knowledgeable community - Open development, very few hooks to jump through if you have something to contribute - No systemd, so: rebooting your system isn't a lottery where, if…
Another nice feature is first class support for ZFS.
Re: Void Linux: Into the Void
#64I liked the sound of this, so i tried to install it. I'm not sure if im just a complete idiot but i can't get it to install. Their liveCD image only lets me connect to WEP/WPA networks, so i can't connect to the WPA2-Enterprise network my school is on. They also don't let you connect to an unsecured endpoint so i cant connect to the alternative network provided.
I also couldn't get it to boot in UEFI, had to switch back to legacy bios. The partition manager is also a little confusing, i can't figure out which sizes to use or how to create them, i like debians ui here alot for this.
I stopped after seeing all that.
Re: Void Linux: Into the Void
#65I usually refrain from distro- (and editor-, and language-) related discussions but I think Void Linux deserves an exception here: - Everything is remarkably simple, (mostly) well-documented and straightforward. - Friendly, dedicated and very knowledgeable community - Open development, very few hooks to jump through if you have something to contribute - No systemd, so: rebooting your system isn't a lottery where, if…
Another nice feature is first class support for ZFS.
Whoa - that is a pretty big item. Thanks for mentioning that. One of my todos this year is to check out encrypted ZFS on Linux. I will try that on Void.
Re: Void Linux: Into the Void
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another nice feature is first class support for ZFS.
Whoa - that is a pretty big item. Thanks for mentioning that. One of my todos this year is to check out encrypted ZFS on Linux. I will try that on Void.
I've been running encrypted ZFS on Void for about a year. [Only caveat: I wasn't able to get an encrypted ZFS root working on Void (there is some issue with grub+luks+zfs), but I have system with an unencrypted ZFS root with an encrypted /home on ZFS.]
Re: Void Linux: Into the Void
#67I ran the musl libc version of Void Linux for a while on one of my laptops but ran into a lot of problems and buggy behavior. If you are going to use Void Linux I would strongly recommend not picking the musl version unless you are specifically interested in improving musl support by filing and/or fixing bugs.
I haven't found the musl flavour of Void particularly buggy; using the musl variant will limit your range of installable packages though since some applications have hard glibc requirements (and many require some sort of patching to work with musl, which can range from trivial to very difficult).
Re: Void Linux: Into the Void
#68How do people compare this to Alpine Linux? I'm interested in both.
Alpine is musl only; Void has both glibc and musl variants. Void seems more desktop-focussed than Alpine, and (at least as of a year ago) I didn't have a lot of luck with ZFS on Alpine.
Re: Void Linux: Into the Void
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoa - that is a pretty big item. Thanks for mentioning that. One of my todos this year is to check out encrypted ZFS on Linux. I will try that on Void.
I've been running encrypted ZFS on Void for about a year. [Only caveat: I wasn't able to get an encrypted ZFS root working on Void (there is some issue with grub+luks+zfs), but I have system with an unencrypted ZFS root with an encrypted /home on ZFS.]
I am so glad to hear encrypted ZFS is stable and working. Thanks for sharing that.
Re: Void Linux: Into the Void
#70"Because of this, xbps-src is in fact not a binary, it is a collection of very intricate shell scripts that use standard tooling available on almost any Linux distribution to bootstrap a compiler, build chroot, and XBPS itself."
When he stepped away from NetBSD, I remember reading that it was because he wanted to work on a package manager.
It might be that the entire raison d'etre for Void Linux is a package manager consisting of shell scripts.
Not sure what he thinks of pkgsrc but IMO their work has made things so easy that, e.g., one can easily use a set of shell scripts instead of pkg-add, etc. I do this to save space on small systems. IME, the pkgsrc bootstrap scripts are a very reliable way to build a gcc toolchain. (build.sh as well)
One project I have had on the list for many years is to build Linux on BSD. Could it be done? Has it been tried?
Also, maybe S6 deserves a mention as another daemontools clone, with the added bonus that it may lead one to discover execline.
Nothing against runit. I use socklog and occasionally udpsvd by the same author.