I love Void. It's like Arch was back when I first tried it. My main machine still runs Slackware, but my Raspberry Pi 2 runs Void and I've been mostly satisfied with it. The unsatisfying bit isn't really Void's fault; a bug in Xorg prevented it from working with musl on ARM. this has since been fixed.
Void Linux: Into the Void
81–90 of 104 posts
Re: Void Linux: Into the Void
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Darch isn't "go get"-able. Things need to be vendored and you'll need a certain version of containerd and runc (which isn't "go get"-able either). Are you having a problem with the Void package script? The go build template for Void is very naive, I wouldn't use it. It uses symlinks which doesnt place nice with vendoring tools. Things will be a lot smoother when vgo is done and their template is updated accordingly.
Except that the makefile really depends on submodule updates and other mechanisms that require a git clone (hard on the build servers) instead of a tarball that can be cached and checksummed.
Yeah, when I added the package, I told them the next version will not require vendoring and can be built without git. The next version will do this.
Re: Void Linux: Into the Void
#83How do people compare this to Alpine Linux? I'm interested in both.
I use both as daily drivers on laptops, and they are both very nice systems. Some differences:
* Alpine is lighter-weight. As at least one point, Alpine packages are split into small parts (usually at least app, app-dev, and app-doc, respectively containing the actual program, the development headers, and the manpages/docs). Alpine also defaults to using Busybox for coreutils.
* Void is rolling release with regular updates and a surprisingly large repo. Alpine has a rolling "edge" release and stable releases that are supported for 2 years.
* Void works on a traditional install to a writable root filesystem; Alpine can do that ("sys" install), or can run in RAM, optionally persisting state).
* Alpine uses hardened kernels. They used to use grsec, not sure what code they use now. Additionally, they configure the system to be locked down; for instance, on the laptop I'm using to type this comment, I can only check the battery status as root, and powertop outright doesn't work (as I understand it, they completely killed off the debugfs interface it needs).
* Void seems to be more into cutting-edge tech; ZFS and wireguard come to mind.
In general, Alpine is designed for embedded, Void is a general-purpose system. Both can do the others' job, but that's their tendencies.
Re: Void Linux: Into the Void
#84I 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…
> if you lose, you get to wait for 90 seconds for some service to stop
Now, now, that's really down to the way you write your RC scripts. Plenty of distros over the years have had timeout-based prereq-waits in their init.d scripts.
(Heck, I currently have a prereq-wait of some kind going on in the early-stage init of a macOS system, because it happens to contain a non-Apple-manufactured NVMe SSD formatted as APFS. Seems like TRIMing APFS volumes gets deferred to boot-time.)
Re: Void Linux: Into the Void
#85"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…
> 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? How do you mean? Compiling the Linux kernel on a BSD machine? Using GNU on BSD (if so, the answer is yes; see Debian GNU/kFreeBSD)? Linux kernel with BSD userland?
Compiling Linux on computer running BSD. User has no computer running Linux, but she has computer running BSD. She builds needed toolchain, downloads and compiles Linux kernel. Its relatively easy to build BSD while running Linux. But vice versa?
Re: Void Linux: Into the Void
#86I 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…
Not only no systemd; Void uses runit, which is systemd's service management principles done The Unix Way™.
Re: Void Linux: Into the Void
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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? How do you mean? Compiling the Linux kernel on a BSD machine? Using GNU on BSD (if so, the answer is yes; see Debian GNU/kFreeBSD)? Linux kernel with BSD userland?
Compiling Linux on computer running BSD. User has no computer running Linux, but she has computer running BSD. She builds needed toolchain, downloads and compiles Linux kernel. Its relatively easy to build BSD while running Linux. But vice versa?
Okay, so I tried it, and I'm going to say, "not easily".
Started from base FreeBSD install, installed gcc and gmake, pulled down a tarball from kernel.org. Did a `gmake x86_64_defconfig` to get started. First problem: FreeBSD calls it "amd64", Linux calls it "ia86". Exported ARCH=ia86 and retried. It gets further now but appears to blow break trying to build some .S files (FreeBSD uses as from GNU binutils, but it's like a decade old). I couldn't figure out how to fix, so gave up:)
I suspect it would work in a Linux jail, though, since that's a GNU userland with a Linux ABI from the kernel. Didn't try, though.
I also won't speak to whether it would work on netbsd/openbsd/etc.
Re: Void Linux: Into the Void
#88I 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.
Do wonder how much of that was from code having adopted GNU-isms...
Almost all of it. Musl AFAIK strongly sticks to the standard. It is one of the biggest things holding back wider adoption.
Similar to the dependence between the linux kernel and GCC. Clang should work but linux also has the 'GNUisms' so deep there a big project called LLVMlinux to correct it.
Re: Void Linux: Into the Void
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do wonder how much of that was from code having adopted GNU-isms...
honestly not that much since adopting a GNU-ism or Glibc-ism will in most case result in errors at compile-time.
Nope. This 'self is the standard' way of GNU software is one reason I'm not a big fan of GNU.
https://wiki.musl-libc.org/functional-differences-from-glibc...
Re: Void Linux: Into the Void
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
It looks like you've already figured out some things like sound, wifi, and xbps, but: I found the following guide helpful in complementing the man pages:
http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/void/voidtips.htm
More articles on Void from the same author, including an install guide: