Entering the Void
Or, my experiment with Void Linux.
With a 32-bit computer and ArchLinux now 64-bit only, it’s time to try something that will run on the old CPU. I picked Void Linux because it’s very basic (like Arch), and doesn’t have systemd. I’m not a great fan of systemd, in part because of the usual complaints, but moreso because it is another milestone on the road to ruining everything that was good about Linux (ie, user control over the system – most distros seem to have this big blob (or set of big blobs) in the middle that are hard to figure out and not very modular).
The void installer was very good. So good, in fact, that there’s nothing to report. It just got the job done.
The next step was to configure /etc/crypttab to unlock my encrypted /home partition. That was also simplicity itself.
Void Linux is very Arch-like in many ways. The main thing to do was to get extra packages to have a working system. Are there any issues?
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I had a little trouble with NetworkManager. First, it required dbus, no surprise there, but I had to tell it to run myself (hooray!). Second, there was some kind of issue with filesystem permissions to delete connections, but that resolved itself with either a reboot or adding myself to an appropriate group (no idea which one that was, though).
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XFCE4 still doesn’t show a proper logout menu. The restart and shutdown icons are greyed, and the suspend-to-RAM and hibernate buttons don’t show at all. This is a typical problem with learning a new distro. I’ll solve that later.
So far that seems to be it.
Posted Thursday, January 17, 2019