Exploring Void Linux - A Different Kind Of Distro

one of the more interesting good news linux distributions out there is void linux what is void linux it's an independent linux distribution meaning it's not based on debian or ubuntu or arch void is its own thing it has its own repository of software it has its own package manager called xbps it has a couple of different versions you can get void linux using glib c which is the gnu c libraries or you can get avoid linux using musl which is an alternative to g-lib c it's more minimal less of a code base uh it's more suckless i guess than g libsy void linux is very much kind of suckless in philosophy it doesn't have system d as its init system it uses its own run it knit system and it's really interesting i have i've looked at void a couple of times before on the channel but it's been a while so today what i wanted to do is i was going to go to the void linux website and grab one of the latest isos and run through an installation so let me switch over to the browser here and on voidlinux.org which is the website you click on the download link and you get to the download page and of course they have a couple of different images here x8664 is of course what i'm going to be using they do have 32-bit images it looks like they also have an arm image as well that could be interesting on our raspberry pi or something like that i might play with that actually i didn't realize void had arm images but today i'm going to grab the x86 64 image and they have some pre-built isos as far as they've got desktop environments already ready to go you've got the the base iso then you've got enlightenment cinnamon lxde lx mate and xfce i'm going to grab the xfce edition and i'm going to grab the musl edition rather than the glib c now if i was installing this on real hardware on a real machine typically i'd choose glib c just for stability reasons just because most things expect g lib c to be on the system but i i just want to see how the installation goes with the musl edition of xfce so i'm going to grab that iso and then i'm going to go ahead and spin up a quick virtual machine inside vert manager so i created a virtual machine here i gave this virtual machine six gigs of ram i gave it two threads of my 24 thread thread ripper and we get to the boot menu here and i'm just going to go ahead and boot directly into the live environment and we've booted into the live environment of course this is the xfce desktop environment before i run through the installation i am going to search for the display program here inside xfce so it's called display settings i'm going to go ahead and pick a screen resolution that makes more sense i'm going to change to 1920 by 1080 tell it to keep that resolution and let's go ahead and run through the installation of void linux first you need to open a terminal there is a terminal docked by default in the xfce desktop environment i believe control alt t would also bring up a terminal yeah that brings up a terminal now let me zoom in a little bit so you can see the installation process first let's switch over to the root user uh it's asking for a root password i'm assuming void linux yeah that was it all right so typically in linux distributions if the root password is needed in a live environment try either the word live the word root or the name of the distribution so luckily it was void linux i'm sure in the documentation on void's website it would have told me that but i don't have the installation guide in front of me and then what you need to do of course as root is type void dash installer and you get this nice in curses installer here and i'm just going to go ahead and click ok and let's go ahead and set up our keyboard and it looks like by default it's chosen ansi dvorak which is probably not right for 99.99 of the people on the planet uh but i guess they just don't choose the default you actually have to go through the list obviously i'm going to want a us keyboard so i type u to get to the use and then i scroll down to us and yeah hit ok and then let's set up the network in the network it should do this automatically just hit ok do you want to use dhcp yes and that should set up our ethernet there network is working properly so hit ok then source set the source installation now you have two choices here you have local and you have network and you many people would think well i'll just use the network like an internet install and get the latest and greatest packages you probably want to choose local though because this will install packages from the iso we downloaded it's going to install all the xfce packages the full desktop environment and the suite of applications that we expect to find so choose local host name now this is the host name of the machine i'm going to call it vert void just so it's descriptive i have a lot of virtual machines and sometimes i ssh into them so it's nice to have a descriptive host name for each machine time zone so this is for me the central time zone in the us i'm going to choose america and i'm going to type c because i typically choose chicago in these lists just because i know it's there and chicago is in the central time zone i'm not actually in chicago of course and then root password so let's create a strong and complicated password for the root user and then verify that and then the user account so let's create a home user so what is our login name our login name does not need to be void i'm going to call my user dt and then the username of dt and then create a strong and complicated password for the dt user all right and then what groups should the dt user be a member of by default it's already put dt as a member of the wheel group the wheel group is very important that gives us sudo privileges and it looks like they've chosen some other sensible groups for him to be a member of such as floppy audio video cd-rom and optical so that makes sense kvm so we have the ability to use kvm virtual machines this was a situation where i was doing this install on a physical machine the ability to have access to virtual machines would be very important for the dt user so i'm just going to go with the defaults here and hit ok now the bootloader what disk are we installing the bootloader to i only have one virtual disk in this virtual machine so there's only one to choose from use a graphical terminal for the bootloader yes and then partition partition the disk so i only have one drive to partition so i'm going to select that what tool do i want to use to partition the disk we have cf disk and we have fdisk as options i'm really comfortable with cf disk although i can use fdisk but i'm going to choose cf disk it's just a very easy command line tool so in cf disk when you first launch it it asks what do you want to set up gpt or dos partition table if i'm doing a master boot record i would do dos if i was doing uefi i would do gpt i'm going to do a dos partition and i'm going to go ahead and create a swap just for purposes of this video i normally wouldn't create a swap in a vm but hey why not so i'm going to hit enter on new and partition size i'm going to do a 1 gig swap no reason to make it you know very big here i'm going to hit enter on primary and then that's really all i needed on that then i'm going to hit the arrow key down to free space do new and then the next partition size 24 gigs that's all of the remaining space on the drive i'm gonna hit enter primary yeah and we created a one gig partition and a 24 gig partition now the one gig partition the type is linux we want to change the type so i'm going to change that to linux swap and the other one what the default type is linux a linux file system so that is correct for the second partition then what we want to do is we want to write that you have to type the full word yes to write and then once you've written it quit all right and now file systems configure file systems and mount points so vda1 was the swap so it needs to be linux swap so vda1 was a swap vda2 of course will be our real file system i'm going to do extend4 ext4 the mount point i'm going to do as root and hit ok do you want to create a new file system on slash dev vda2 yes and uh i think we're done i don't know why it still says file system type as none on both of them even though i selected swap and extend4 i'm assuming that's just a bug in the installer i'm going to choose done and hope this works out and then let's go ahead and go to the install says warning dead on partitions will be completely destroyed for new file systems do you want to continue and it you notice vda1 mounted on swap as swap vda2 mounted on root as extend4 so it does recognize that i want these as a swap and an extend4 partition so i'm going to choose yes to go ahead and format the drive and start the installation i don't know how long the installation process will be i don't think void has a ton of packages installed by default so it should be a rather quick installation process and it says void linux has installed correctly do you want to reboot your system yes by the way the installation took like two minutes so that was a very fast installation so it's rebooted and we get a grub menu so it looks like the installation worked just fine so let's go ahead and boot into our freshly installed void linux get our login manager so let me log in and we get the xfce desktop once again let me look for the display settings and fix the resolution i'm going to choose 1920 by 1080 again keep this configuration and now it should remember the 1920 by 1080 resolution from here on out every time i come back to this vm it wouldn't remember it in the live environment of course because nothing is saved in the live environment but now that we've got it actually installed we should never have to do that again now there's not much to look at as far as the desktop environment suite of applications installed because void is very vanilla this is a very vanilla xfce this is straight xfce as it comes from xfce it's a standard default look with the xfce dock down here with a few icons in the dock and you've got your applications menu this old school windows 98 applications menu and you've got the standard suite of xfce applications plus some other stuff we do have a web browser firefox was installed for us under graphics we have the rastretto image viewer under accessories uh just mousepad thundar the standard xfce stuff there's really not much here and that's kind of cool i like minimal installations because i'd rather pick my own suite of software you know if i want to office suite i'll install it if i want a bunch of multimedia programs i'll install it and really i think the main thing i should show you guys is some of the under the hood stuff with void because that's really what separates void so i'm going to open a terminal and let me zoom in again and let's go ahead and play around with the package manager void has its own custom package manager called xbps and if i go to the void website they do have a nice page explaining the package manager and the various commands with the xbps package manager you use xbps dash query to search for packages xbps install to install packages and xbps remove to remove packages those are the three most commonly used commands there so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and get back into the desktop and let's go ahead and run some of these xbps commands so i'm going to do we should update the system because i don't know how old this iso was and we installed packages from the iso so let's go ahead and sync the repositories and actually update the system so i'm going to do sudo xbps dash install and then give it this flag dash s for sync the repositories dash u to update the packages and it's asking for a root password so give it your super secure and strong complicated root password and it says the xbps package must be updated so before we can actually use xbps we've got to update the package manager itself so let's do xbps install dash u to update and the package we want to update is xbps all right so let's go ahead and update the package manager and then once we've got the package manager updated i'm going to up arrow and run the command to actually update everything on the system so that's xbps install dash capital s lowercase u and this time it works just fine it looks like yeah there's a lot of things to update i'm going to go ahead and run this update i'm going to pause the video so we've updated all the packages on the system and looking at the documentation for xbps it does mention about restarting services after you do a system update with xbps install dash su it says xbps does not restart services when they are updated so to find processes that are running different versions that are present on the disk you should run the x check restart tool provided by the x tools package and you should run this as an unprivileged user meaning don't use sudo for this so i'm actually going to do that let's see if we find any uh processes that needed to be restarted so if i do x check restart that command is not found the documentation did say it was part of a package called xtools so what i'm going to do is i'm going to sudo xbps dash install and then do x tools and it's going to ask for the root password and then it's going to install a few things looks like some pearl libraries and now that i've got those installed let me do x check restart one more time and yes there were a number of programs running on the system that needed to be restarted another thing i want to do is i do want to do an install of h-top because i would like to check system resource usage using h-top all right now that we've got h-top installed let me go ahead and run that and wow 289 megs of ram of the six gigs of ram i gave this machine now this really shows you how minimal and how suckless void linux as a distribution is the reason it's only using 289 megs of ram is because nothing's really here nothing is installed there's very few background daemons running so it's a really really minimal distribution now once you start installing a lot of programs and you're going to start a lot of services you're going to have a lot of background demons running in the background once you put you know your full suite of software here you know that number's going to crawl back up but still that's still really small for xfce even xfce even though it's light typically when i do standard xfce distributions it's using 500 megs of ram typically this thing was using about half of that while we're at the command line let's go ahead and do a you name dash r to get the kernel kernel version 5.10.17. so pretty recent kernel not terribly bleeding edge but pretty new the next thing i want to do is i want to search for some software because if i was going to use void linux on like one of my main machines i would need to know that certain programs were available in the repository so let's use xbps dash query to search for software give it this flag dash capital r lowercase s this searches for programs on the repositories on the remote repositories what am i searching for i would like to know if xmonet is available yes there's two exmoned programs in the repository exmonette which is the tiling window manager and exmonet dash contrib which is those third party libraries needed to make xmo ned x monad how about xmo bar because i'm gonna need the panel for it as well yeah that's there as well uh is there anything else i would be interested in q-tile and not a lot of distributions package q-tile there's still several distributions that don't have q-tile in their repositories debian for one actually doesn't have q-tile in the repositories neither does void unfortunately so i'm not too surprised at that i would assume the awesome window manager would be packaged it's way too popular not to be there yeah of course awesome awesome's been around since the beginning of time everybody should have that in their repositories now another cool flag that you can use with xbps dash query is the dash l flag for list of the packages that are installed on your system so this gives you a list of all the packages installed on the system unfortunately we want to get a count of that so i could pipe that through wc and then dash l and we get 547 lines in that list that means there's only 547 packages installed if you wanted to get a list of actual the package names for maybe you wanted to create your own script to deploy all of these programs later you could actually pipe this into a program like alk you guys know i love to do awk and of course what you want to do is print out the second column because the first column are these two i's and that is not needed all we want is the second column we also didn't want the third column which was the description that actually gives you the package names unfortunately it gives you the uh package version numbers as well so that actually would not work if you were creating a like a deployment script so you would want to remove the the numbers at the end here now looking at the documentation for xbps they actually tell you how to get rid of the numbers in that xbps query dash l command you pipe it through alt like we did to get the second column that made sense but then you need to pipe it into xorgs and then with xorgs you need to pass the command on to xbps you helper and apparently that has a function in it called get package name where it gets the package names without those numbers so let's actually try that out since i only need to do one more pipe let's pipe it into xrs and give x args this flag dash n1 and then we're passing all of this information on to xbps dash uhelper and then get pkg name and now we get an actual list and if you wanted to you could then take that list and then direct that to a file for example packages dot text and now when i do a ls here you see packages dot text if i open that in vm i'm assuming vm is installed it is not oh my goodness do i really have to use nano nano's not installed either so there's there's only one other thing i can try vi of course is going to be here and that's our package list so now this makes it very easy later if you want to you know reproduce this exact same void setup you've got your list of programs that were installed so let me quit out of vi the only other thing other than the package manager that really separates void of course and the real reason void has such a big following is a lot of people of course don't like systemd as an init system and void has their own init system called run it they've been using it forever and it's a really simple init system not a lot of lines of code to it and it's pretty easy to use actually a lot of the run it commands are very similar to your system ctl commands that you use with system d for example those of you that are used to systemd know this command here system ctl status and then name of service you know so if i was checking on the status of ufw the uncomplicated firewall it's not installed here on void but you know that's how you would do that with systemd uh in void what you would do is instead of system ctl status it would be sv for services status and then name of service and of course you have to be root or you have to have sudo privileges here to run the status command and run it you do not have to be root to run the status command with system d so that is one difference and of course ufw is not installed let's pick a service we know is installed so i'm going to do dhcp cd and that was of course our networking daemon and you see now we get some information returned and it's giving us a 84 seconds normally up so let's talk about turning on and off services or you know starting and stopping them so instead of start you use up to start a service so sudo sv up name of service would start it sudo down name of service would stop it and then of course we've already talked about this status command and then you also have restart and of course that would restart a service so pretty similar to how you start and stop services and restart services with system d very similar to how you do it also in open rc it's one of the reasons why i tell you guys i really don't care about the init systems they come install on my linux distributions systemd run it open rc i can take any of them i can leave any of them it really doesn't matter to me these days though i i typically i would prefer to have system d on the system because there's too many things now there's too many pieces of software out there unfortunately that have hard dependencies on systemd for example i still sometimes like to install snap packs and snap still has a hard dependency on systemd unfortunately which means you could not actually install snaps on a distribution like void let me minimize this terminal i may come back to it i want to right click on the desktop and i'm going to go to desktop settings let's see if there's any wallpapers to choose from no so no wallpaper packs were installed this is the standard xfce wallpaper pack which just has four wallpapers in it and they're all a picture of the xfc mouse and the little mascot so let's install some wallpaper packs because this is going to be one of the first things people want to do when you install a plain vanilla desktop environment like this you know you want some icon sets gtk themes and all of that i'm not going to install all of that on camera but i'll show you how you would do this what you would do is you would do the xbps dash query command again and then let's do dash rs to search in the repositories and then i'm going to search for backgrounds and there are two wallpaper packs gnome dash backgrounds and mate dash backgrounds and those are actually much nicer wallpaper packs than the xfce ones so now what you would want to do if you wanted both of these is do a sudo xbps dash install and then those packages i'm going to do gnome dash backgrounds and mate dash backgrounds and give it your sudo password and i love how it tells you that the space available on the disk when you're installing software it lets me know i've got 20 gigs of space available on this disk that is a really nice touch actually especially in a vm where you can actually run out of space rather quickly when you start installing especially big programs and now that is that is installed i'm going to go ahead and close the terminal and now i'm going to go to desktop settings and now the folder i want is let's go to other and we want to go to user share backgrounds and instead of xfce let's go into the gnome folder here and then open and now we get the gnome wallpaper pack and yeah these are much nicer wallpapers you guys have seen many of these wallpapers it's just the standard gnome wallpaper pack yeah that one's really nice even though it's hot as hades outside here in louisiana this time of year it does cool me off a little bit to have a wintry photo there anyway that wallpaper there's just a nice touch it's still a very plain vanilla xfce desktop environment of course you can customize it to your heart's content this was really just a very cursory look at void linux really what i wanted to share with you guys is the installation process and some of the under the hood stuff how it differs than most new slash linux distributions obviously it has its own unique packages and repositories it's on package manager and of course it uses the run it a net system now before i go i want to thank a few special people i want to thank the producers of this episode absolutely gabe james mitchell with paul scott west comey alan chuck curt david dilling gregory heiko mike aryan alexander peace and fedor polytechnic raver red prophet stephen and willie these guys they're my highest tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this episode about void linux would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well these names you're seeing on the screen these are all my supporters over on patreon because i don't have any corporate sponsors i'm just sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work and want to help me out consider supporting distrotube over on patreon all right guys peace not having q-tile is a total deal breaker

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 75,153

Rating: 4.9224172 out of 5

Keywords: void linux, rolling release, void linux install, void linux review, void linux vs arch, operating system, void linux installation guide, install void linux, how to install void linux, void linux xfce, void linux 2021, void linux distrotube, void linux install guide, linux, gnu linux, linux distro review, runit, xbps package manager, runit init system, musl vs glibc, linux tutorial, linux terminal, command line, distrotube

Id: 49jhT9SaOcQ

Length: 25min 16sec (1516 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Snackcode]

Decent distro dt. Systemd alternatives are fine. Systemd haters just want shine or get attention too. I look at it at sorta like a automatic versus a manual. Dt I think Systemd isn't just a init system. Its sorta like emacs in a way, versus other editors. Haters of it just wanna shine and get attention as well. The caveat is knowing how to navigate and fix such systems, if when and they do break. If they wanna take that route. Minimal os installs have they issues as well. Check out "Alpine linux" dt.