How to install void linux

Installation

This section includes general information about the process of installing Void. For specific guides, see the «Advanced Installation» section.

Base system requirements

Void can be installed on very minimalist hardware, though we recommend the following minimums for most installations:

Architecture	CPU	RAM	Storage
x86_64-glibc	x86_64	96MB	700MB
x86_64-musl	x86_64	96MB	600MB
i686-glibc	Pentium 4 (SSE2)	96MB	700MB

Note that flavor installations require more resources; how much more depends on the flavor.

Void is not available for the i386, i486, or i586 architectures.

Before installing musl Void, please read the «musl» section of this Handbook, so that you are aware of software incompatibilities.

It is highly recommended to have a network connection available during install to download updates, but this is not required. ISO images contain installation data on-disk and can be installed without network connectivity.

Downloading installation media

The most recent live images and rootfs tarballs can be downloaded from https://alpha.de.repo.voidlinux.org/live/current/. They can also be downloaded from other mirrors. Previous releases can be found under https://alpha.de.repo.voidlinux.org/live/, organized by date.

Verifying images

Each image release’s directory contains two files used to verify the image(s) you download. First, there is a sha256sum.txt file containing image checksums to verify the integrity of the downloaded images. Second is the sha256sum.sig file, used to verify the authenticity of the checksums.

It is necessary to verify both the image’s integrity and authenticity. It is, therefore, recommended that you download both files.

Verifying image integrity

You can verify the integrity of a downloaded file using sha256sum(1) with the sha256sum.txt file downloaded above. The following command will check the integrity of only the image(s) you have downloaded:

This verifies that the image is not corrupt.

Verifying digital signature

Prior to using any image you’re strongly encouraged to validate the signatures on the image to ensure they haven’t been tampered with.

Current images are signed using a signify key that is specific to the release. If you’re on Void already, you can obtain the keys from the void-release-keys package, which will be downloaded using your existing XBPS trust relationship with your mirror. You will also need a copy of signify(1); on Void this is provided by the outils package.

To obtain signify when using a Linux distribution or operating system other than Void Linux:

• Install the signify package in Arch Linux and Arch-based distros.
• Install the signify-openbsd package in Debian and Debian-based distros.
• Install the package listed here for your distribution.
• Install signify-osx with homebrew in macOS.

If you can’t obtain signify for some reason (e.g. you are on Windows and can’t use WSL or MinGW), you can use minisign(1) to verify the file.

If you are not currently using Void Linux, it will also be necessary to obtain the appropriate signing key from our Git repository here.

Once you’ve obtained the key, you can verify your image with the sha256sum.sig file. The following example demonstrates the verification of the GCP musl filesystem from the 20191109 release:

If the verification process does not produce the expected «OK» status, do not use it! Please alert the Void Linux team of where you got the image and how you verified it, and we will follow up on it.

For verification with minisign , it is necessary to rename the sha256sum.sig file to sha256sum.txt.minisig and remove the first line from the .pub release key. The following example demonstrates the verification of the sha256sum.txt file from the 20191109 release:

The same warning as above applies. If the verification process isn’t successful, do not use the file — warn the Void Linux team about it.

Источник

Installation Guide

Once you have downloaded a Void image to install and prepared your install media, you are ready to install Void Linux.

Before you begin installation, you should determine whether your machine boots using BIOS or UEFI. This will affect how you plan partitions. See Partitioning Notes for more detail.

The following features are not supported by the installer script:

Booting

Boot your machine from the install media you created. If you have enough RAM, there is an option on the boot screen to load the entire image into ram, which will take some time but speed up the rest of the install process.

Once the live image has booted, log in as root with password voidlinux and run:

The following sections will detail each screen of the installer.

Keyboard

Select the keymap for your keyboard; standard «qwerty» keyboards will generally use the «us» keymap.

Network

Select your primary network interface. If you do not choose to use DHCP, you will be prompted to provide an IP address, gateway, and DNS servers.

If you intend to use a wireless connection during the installation, you may need to configure it manually using wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd manually before running void-installer .

Source

To install packages provided on the install image, select Local . Otherwise, you may select Network to download the latest packages from the Void repository.

Warning!: If you are installing a desktop environment from a »flavor» image, you MUST choose Local for the source!

Hostname

Select a hostname for your computer (that is all lowercase, with no spaces.)

Locale

Select your default locale settings. This option is for glibc only, as musl does not currently support locales.

Timezone

Select your timezone based on standard timezone options.

Root password

Enter and confirm your root password for the new installation. The password will not be shown on screen.

User account

Choose a login (default void ) and a descriptive name for that login. Then enter and confirm the password for the new user. You will then be prompted to verify the groups for this new user. They are added to the wheel group by default and will have sudo access. Default groups and their descriptions are listed here.

Bootloader

Select the disk to install a bootloader on when Void is installed. You may select none to skip this step and install a bootloader manually after completing the installation process. If installing a bootloader, you will also be asked whether or not you want a graphical terminal for the GRUB menu.

Partition

Next, you will need to partition your disks. Void does not provide a preset partition scheme, so you will need to create your partitions manually with cfdisk(8). You will be prompted with a list of disks. Select the disk you want to partition and the installer will launch cfdisk for that disk. Remember you must write the partition table to the drive before you exit the partition editor.

If using UEFI, it is recommended you select GPT for the partition table and create a partition (typically between 200MB-1GB) of type EFI System , which will be mounted at /boot/efi .

If using BIOS, it is recommended you select MBR for the partition table. Advanced users may use GPT but will need to create a special BIOS partition for GRUB to boot.

See the Partitioning Notes for more details about partitioning your disk.

Filesystems

Create the filesystems for each partition you have created. For each partition you will be prompted to choose a filesystem type, whether you want to create a new filesystem on the partition, and a mount point, if applicable. When you are finished, select Done to return to the main menu.

If using UEFI, create a vfat filesystem and mount it at /boot/efi .

Review settings

It is a good idea to review your settings before proceeding. Use the right arrow key to select the settings button and hit . All your selections will be shown for review.

Install

Selecting Install from the menu will start the installer. The installer will create all the filesystems selected, and install the base system packages. It will then generate an initramfs and install a GRUB2 bootloader to the bootable partition.

These steps will all run automatically, and after the installation is completed successfully, you can reboot into your new Void Linux install!

Post installation

After booting into your Void installation for the first time, perform a system update.

Источник

Installation

This entry attempts to walk through the basic steps required to perform a minimal Void Linux installation via a Void live image . It does not attempt to go into fine detail for every step but additional documentation may be found linked throughout this document, as well as via man pages, additional resources in the Guides section etc.

If you are installing on a UEFI system, and wish to do so in UEFI mode, then you should read the notes in the green boxes that specify instructions for UEFI systems,If you encounter any issues please refer to troubleshooting for basic troubleshooting.

Contents

Getting Started

Download the Void live image ISO from https://alpha.de.repo.voidlinux.org/live/current/ and create an installation medium.

For further information regarding the live images and system requirements, see Live Images.

Installation

Boot your machine using the previously-created installation medium. You can choose to run the live image from the media, or, if you have the resources available, you can load the contents of the image into RAM. This option takes some time at the beginning but provides a quicker-overall installation procedure.

Once the live image has booted to a login prompt, log in as root using password voidlinux and then run:

Keyboard

Select the keymap for your keyboard; standard «qwerty» keyboards will generally use the «us» keymap.

Network

Select your primary network interface. If you use DHCP on your network, select that option, otherwise the installer will prompt for IP Address, Netmask, and Gateway.

If you intend to use a wireless connection during the installation, you might have to configure it manually using wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd before running void-installer. Simply follow the instructions given here.

Source

Choose whether you want to install from a local source (the packages that are included in the ISO) or from the network (in which case packages are downloaded from the Void remote repositories). Installing from the network allows you to install the most up-to-date packages available from the official repositories. Note that installing from local will also install any desktop included in the ISO (eg xfce)

Hostname

Set a hostname for your computer remembering that hostnames should be all lower case, with no spaces.

Locale

Configure your default locale settings, this will be used to set the libc locale in a glibc environment.

The locale setting does not currently respond with the musl installer. Locales are not currently supported natively in musl.

Timezone

Set your timezone based on standard timezone options.

Root Password

Enter and confirm the password used for the root account on your new Void installation. The password will not be shown on screen.

User Account

Choose a login (default void ) and a descriptive name for that login (default Void User ). Then enter and confirm the password for this default user. Finally you may choose to modify the group memberships for the user or go with the defaults.

BootLoader

Determine whether you’d like to use the installer to automatically install GRUB2 to the disk, or choose none if you’d like to install/configure a bootloader manually after completing the installation process.

Partition

Void does not provide an automatic/preset partition scheme, so you will need to create this manually using cfdisk . Please be sure to read the disclaimer regarding partition table formatting information if you are unfamiliar with the differences between BIOS/UEFI and MBR/GPT. Upon completion of your partitioning, choose ‘Write’ in cfdisk, type the word ‘yes’ to confirm, and select ‘Quit’ to return to the Void installer. See Disks for further information.

First, while UEFI systems are supposed to support MBR-based partition tables, the reality may be less predictable and the newer GPT scheme is going to be a better choice, especially if you have one of the larger Advanced Format disks. Use GPT.

Second, you need to create an EFI system partition, generally the first one. It does not need to be large; it is common to create one between 200MB and 1GB. When you create this partition in cfdisk, you need to change the type from the default «Linux» to the type appropriate to the ESP:

• For GPT disks, change the type to EFI System .
• For MBR (DOS) disks, create a primary partition and change the type to ef (EFI). [Not recommended]

Filesystems

Create the filesystems used to populate the partitions you just created. Choose your filesystem type, specify the mountpoint and create the filesystem, if necessary, for each partition you mean to modify. Once finished, select Back to return to the main installer menu. See Filesystems.

Once finished, select Back to return to the main installer menu. For additional information, see Disks#Filesystems.

Review Settings

Before installing, it is generally a good idea to review the installation settings. Arrow right from the main menu to select settings and use to review.

Install

This step of the installer creates the filesystems specified in the previous step, then downloads all of the base packages (if configured to install via Network) and copies them to the target partition/partitions configured in the previous steps. After that, the installer generates an initramfs and installs GRUB2 to the bootable partition.

After the installation is successfully completed, you can reboot into your new Void Linux install!

Post-Installation

Once you boot into your new Void installation, continue to Post-installation for further configuration tips.

Notes/Issues

Notes on Grub2 EFI Loader installation.

Grub2 possesses the ability to install an EFI loader to the EFI System Partition, as well as to modify the BootOrder variable in the system firmware. This works on most well-behaved UEFI imlementations. However, there are reports of a couple of issues on some systems/motherboards:

• The BootOrder variable is not updated.
• The BootOrder is not saved/followed by the system.

If the BootOrder variable fails to be updated, then the system will not boot the newly-installed Void system without some extra configuration.

To confirm that BootOrder has been updated before your final reboot, you can run the command efibootmgr with no arguments. The output should include something like this:

See the man page for efibootmgr for more information on the capabilities and use of this program. If you see the option «void_grub» and it is listed first in BootOrder, then the variables have been successfully updated, and you can try to reboot. If not, keep reading.

In cases where BootOrder is either not updated, or not saved/followed after you reboot, then you should try copying grubx64.efi to the common default EFI loader location. You’ll need to mount your EFI partition, and we’ll assume it’s on /mnt/. (In your installed Void system, the mount point would normally be /boot/efi/)

On 32-bit firmware it should be

You may then need to set the default boot disk in your computer’s setup utility, but Void/Grub2 should boot correctly after this.

Note that you can boot your system back into the LiveCD to perform this operation if you were unable to boot to your Void Installation.

Notes on Partitioning

Cfdisk does not give me a choice of partition table type.

If the disk has already been initialized, cfdisk will continue with the partition table layout already present.

If your disk was previously partitioned with the MBR scheme, you will see the text «label: dos» near the top of the cfdisk screen. At this point, you will want to back out of the installer and run cfdisk manually with the «-z» option to start with an uninitialized disk layout, where you will then be prompted for the label type and continue with a new partition layout.

If the disk was previously using GPT, then you will see the text «Label: gpt» near the top of the cfdisk screen.

Multiple Partitions

It is common practice to put various subdirectories of / onto their own mounted partition, and there often good reasons for doing so.

However, it is important to note, because of Void’s adoption of a more modern method for laying out the file system (known as the «/usr merge»), you must not try to place /usr on a separate partition. When you attempt to do so, the installer will inform you that this is not supported in Void. For information as to the «whats» and «whys» of the /usr merge, please see https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge/.

Separate Boot Partition: While there are very few cases where this would be useful today, some people will opt to create a separate /boot partition, creating a nested mount scenario, where you have one partition mounted at /boot/ and a second partition mounted at /boot/efi.

This creates a problem in the installer where it may fail at grub-install, as the /boot/efi directory isn’t created on the /boot/ partition. To avoid this particular failure the options are as follows:

• In the Filesystems stage, make sure to assign the EFI System Partition last. As long as /boot is assigned before /boot/efi, then it will be mounted before the creation of the /boot/efi/ mountpoint, and no trouble will arise.
• Don’t use a separate /boot/ partition. One of the few cases where it might be desirable would be when having an encrypted root, but unencrypted /boot. Various ways of booting encrypted systems and the reasoning behind each is a rather large discussion of its own.
  • To the author’s knowledge, Grub is the only EFI loader that, at the time of this writing, can open LUKS/LVM containers itself, so the use of other loaders would require the kernel and initrd to be on an unencrypted filesystem.
  • Another way to deal with this would be to use the ESP as /boot/ itself, but there are issues. Grub will need to be installed manually, as the installer assumes the ESP exists at /boot/efi/ and you will have to override this.
  • Lastly, you could use your preferred EFI loader to control all boot options, but allow it to chainload Grub which can handle booting your encrypted Linux installation. Obviously this does not avoid the use of Grub, so if that is one’s goal, then this is not a satisfying option.

This can actually be an issue for any nested mount scenario, though such schemes aren’t that common, and may not need to be configured at install-time.

Platform-specific notes

Bitness — Note that UEFI loader bitness (i.e. 32-bit or 64-bit) must match that of the firmware. So 64-bit firmware only runs a 64-bit loader (bootx64.efi), while 32-bit firmware only runs a 32-bit loader (bootia32.efi).

However, the loader can switch the CPU mode, so it is possible to boot a 64-bit kernel from a 32-bit EFI loader (given support in the loader), provided the CPU is actually x86_64 architecture. The reverse is also true (32-bit EFI kernel booted by a 64-bit EFI loader).

This applies only to firmware bitness. It is still not possible, for obvious reasons, to load a 64-bit OS on a 32-bit CPU.

Working Platforms

This procedure has been tested on the following systems: (Please add any systems/motherboards where this procedure has been successfully followed)

QEMU/KVM virtual machine on 64-bit OVMF firmware image (64-bit guest, 64-bit host) — x86_64 Void Install CD. BootOrder updated successfully, BootOrder obeyed by system.

QEMU/KVM virtual machine on 32-bit OVMF firmware image (32/64-bit guests, 64-bit host) — i686 and x86_64 Void Install CD. BootOrder updated successfully, BootOrder obeyed by system.

ASROCK Z77 Extreme4 (Intel Z77 chipset, 64-bit firmware) — x86_64 Void Install CD. BootOrder updated successfully, BootOrder obeyed by system.

Less-than-working Platforms

The following platforms have had issues with this procedure: (Please add any systems/motherboards that have issues related to EFI installation, as well as workarounds, if any.)

32-bit Firmware

Current ISOs have full support for loading both 32- and 64-bit OSes on both 32- and 64-bit firmwares. Tweaking the install script or adding packages to the install environment should no longer be necessary.

Источник