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.