 Today, I'm going to be taking a look at VoidLinux. Now, this is a really interesting Linux distribution because Void doesn't use system D. It uses its own runnet and its system and also has its own package manager. It's an independent distro, so its package manager is XBPS. And, you know, if you wanted to, you didn't have to use the G-Lib C, the GNU Lib C libraries. You could use MUSL as well. It's really quite interesting if you go to VoidLinux.org, you can see some of their claim to fame here. You can see it's independent distro, not a fork. You have some options as far as your C libraries are concerned. It is a rolling release distribution, but they claim it is a stable rolling release distribution. And that may be the case. I've never actually used Void long-term on any of my personal machines. I've always, you know, just tested it out for a couple of weeks at a time on physical equipment. And of course, I've taken a look at it, Quick looks at it in virtual machines before. And today, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take it for a quick spin. I'm going to spin up a VM. I'm going to take a quick first look at VoidLinux 6.6.21. So I created a virtual machine here. I gave this virtual machine six gigs of my 64 gigs of RAM on the system, but six gigs of RAM is plenty for a distribution. Kind of a minimal distribution that is Void. I also gave this virtual machine two threads of my 24 thread CPU. So let me go ahead and boot into the live environment and the live environment has loaded up. Now I am using the XFCE edition. Now VoidLinux does put out a few different desktop ISOs. I know you can get it with KDE and LXQ and I think you can get GNOME as well. There's like four or five different desktop additions, but I guess the main ISO, the one that seems to be their default desktop has always been the XFCE edition. So that's the one I'm taking a look at. And, you know, before I take a look at it, I'm not gonna take a look at it on a live image. I'm actually gonna run through an installation. Now VoidLinux is interesting because they don't have a graphical installer. It's not the Calamari's installer or the ubiquity installer or whatever it happens to be. It's a command line installation. So I'm gonna open a terminal and let me zoom in. Now I know at some point during the installation I'm gonna have to partition a drive manually. I'm just gonna go ahead and do it right now. I could use a tool like FDisk or I could use a simpler tool like CFDisk. I'm gonna use CFDisk for purposes of this video. I need to switch over to the root user here. So SU and the password, I believe the root password on VoidLinux is VoidLinux. Yeah, VoidLinux, no spaces, all one word, VoidLinux. And now I should be able to run the CFDisk command. Now because I'm in a VM, I'm gonna do a DOS partition type. If you were doing this on physical hardware, you're probably gonna do UEFI and you would choose GPT. But for me, I'm gonna do the DOS table here. And for me, I'm not going to bother creating a whole bunch of partitions. You know what, I will create a swap just for, so you guys can see how to create the swap. So typically you wanna create your swap drive first. So let's do a new partition. I'm only gonna give it one gig of space though, which is plenty for this VM. So we're gonna create a one gig primary partition and the type needs to be linux swap. And right now it defaults to partition type is linux. So that's not right. So let me go to type and go to type 82 linux swap, that's it. And now what I need to do is I need to down arrow and go to free space and do a second new partition. This partition is gonna be the remaining space 19 gigs, primary once again. Now this one can be the default partition type is linux. That's fine, but I also need to make sure that this my main partition is bootable. So let's turn on the bootable flag. So let me hit enter on that to turn the boot flag on. And now let's write that. And I have to type the full word Y-E-S, yes, to write that. And now that we've done that, let's go ahead and quit out of CF disk. So now we've partitioned our drives. Now let's go ahead and launch the void linux installer. And it is called void dash installer. We have to run it as root, which we've already logged in as root here. So this is going to be an incurses installer. If you've ever used old incurses installers like on Debian back in the day, or if you ever installed FreeBSD as an incurses installer, you know, they're all very similar. You just go step by step and do each step. So first let's set the keyboard. So my keyboard is going to be a US keyboard. Let's see if I hit U, yeah, I can go to the US. And now let me just find US and network set up Let's see, network is working properly. Great, it does it automatically. Don't have to do anything. Source, let's set the source installation. Now, because I downloaded an ISO, we're getting everything from the ISO, right? I don't need to pull down anything over the internet. So we'll just do local, select a mirror. Let's see, does it select a default mirror for us? No, it tells us we need to select one. Select a mirror geographically close to you. Okay, so I am obviously in North America and the best mirrors are the tier one mirrors, but there are several tier two mirrors. The closest one to me here in Louisiana would be the one in Kentucky. It's a tier two mirror, but I'm gonna go with the tier one Chicago mirror for purposes of this video. I think it'll be fine. The following operations will be executed. Sure, it's updating the mirrors. The mirrors were updated successfully. Let me hit okay. Let's set the host name to the computer. So I'm gonna call this computer void dash vert and then locale. So my locale obviously is gonna be English US. If I hit E, we'll get to the E's, but they're not alphabetically sorted, at least not by the left column. It's actually sorted alphabetically by the right column. So I need to search for English United States of America. There it is, EN underscore US, that's it. And then time zone. So the time zone, I need America slash Chicago. So we hit C to go to the C's and there is Chicago, even though I'm not in Chicago guys, right? But Chicago's in the central time zone. Louisiana's in the central time zone. So it works out just my root password. So I'm gonna go ahead and create a super secure root password. And then type the root password again. Now let's create our user account. So let me hit enter. So primary login name, I'm gonna call my user DT and his display name will be DT. And now let's create a strong and complicated password for our DT user. And repeat the strong and complicated password. Now we need to add the DT user to some groups. The most important groups to be a part of are the wheel groups. So you have pseudo privileges. Also you typically wanna make sure that you're in the audio group, the video group, the optical drive group. It'll look like they've already turned on the important ones, audio, video, CD-ROM, optical, KVMs, another important one if you're gonna use VMs on your void Linux installation. Yeah, all that's fine. So we'll just go with it. Now the boot loader. So I've only got the one option here to choose slash dev slash VDA. So I'm gonna choose that. Do we want to use a graphical terminal for the boot loader? Sure, why not? And now partition. So, okay, so if I partition, it's asking I drive to partition. I've already partitioned the drive and it's asking me to do it again. I could choose CFDISC or FDISC. I'd already done this step. You know what? So I don't think I need to do that. I'm gonna go back. I'm gonna skip that step because I've already partitioned that drive. So file systems. And you can see my two partition slash dev slash VDA one was the swap slash dev slash VDA two is the main partition. So slash dev slash VDA two. Let's go ahead and change that. And we need to install a file system to it. I'm gonna install the extend for file system. The mount point needs to be root. So just a single slash. Do you want to create a new file system on slash dev slash VDA two? Yes. And now let's go ahead and on VDA one, that's the swap. Let's go ahead and make sure that that is set to swap for the file system. Yeah. I think we're good on that. So let's go ahead and choose done. So we've done the partition, the file systems now. The only thing left to do is run the installation. It says warning data on the partitions will be completely destroyed. Yada, yada, yada. I'm gonna choose yes. And assuming we ran through the installer correctly, it's going to install void Linux for us. This should take just a few minutes. I'm gonna pause the video. I'll be back once the installation has completed. And the installer completed. That took about two minutes or so for that last install process where it just took all the packages on the ISO and installed them for us. So do we want to reboot the system right now? Sure, why not? So let me go ahead. I guess I didn't need to go back to the menu and choose yes. It's going to do everything for us. And we get a grub menu. So obviously the installation did work. And we come to our login manager. This looks like LightDM, although it's not themed in any way. They didn't apply anything. It's just probably the vanilla LightDM package, you know, nothing else to it. So very plain looking login manager. And when I log into XFCE, oh, it's gonna take a minute, I guess, for the wallpaper to draw. Doesn't look like it's going to give us a 1920x1080 resolution but I can take care of that myself. So let's go to settings. Let's go to display. Let's go ahead and choose 1920x1080. And now that we've actually got this properly installed, this virtual machine forever. When I come back to this virtual machine, it should remember XFCE will remember I want 1920x1080 for the screen resolution. So let's take a quick look at what is pre-installed out of the box here on Void Linux, their XFCE edition. Before we get to the categories, you have some quick launchers for a terminal file manager, email and browser. You have those same quick launchers down here in the dock as well. You have terminal file manager, browser, application finder. Let's go ahead and actually see what the browser is. I'm assuming it's probably Firefox and it is, if I go to help about Firefox, you can see they're on Firefox 123.0. If I get into the menu system here and go into accessories, you can see we have mouse pad, which is the plain text editor for XFCE. Also under accessories, we have the task manager, we have Thunar, which is the file manager, just a standard file manager for Linux. Although Thunar is really nice. That's fully featured as far as a file manager. It's got everything you could possibly want for a file manager. We have a development category, not much here, the icon browser. We have a graphics category. We have the Restretto image viewer, just a standard image viewer, part of the XFCE suite of applications. Under internet, you got the browser, Firefox, under multimedia, parole is the media player and we have post audio volume control really not much else. I'm not gonna go into the system settings or the settings here, which is all the standard XFCE settings, things like your accessibility, appearance, theming, display, mouse and keyboard, things like that. So really very, very few applications installed out of the box. That's probably why that install process was so quick. It literally took about two minutes for it to actually install all the packages onto the system. So let's talk about what's different with VoidLinux compared to other Linux distributions you may be familiar with. Well, let me zoom in here. I'm in the XFCE terminal. VoidLinux uses its own package manager, right? It's an independent distribution, so it has its own packaging system and its own package manager. The package manager is XBPS. And to install software or to update software, you use XBPS-install. This is the name of the binary here, XBPS-install. And if you want to update the system, dash capital S lowercase u, kind of similar to Pac-Man commands, right? So let's go ahead and it's permission denied because obviously you need to have sudo permission to install and remove software dummy, right? DT, what are you thinking, right? And there are a few updates. So I may go ahead and wait just a couple of minutes for this update. It shouldn't take too long. This ISO, by the way, was just released less than a week ago. So there shouldn't be too many packages that needed to update. Although one of the packages that's updating, it looks like the Linux kernel is gonna update to 6.6.22 because I think by default, this was voidlinux6.6.21. I think they were using the versioning number for voidlinux to match the kernel. So we're gonna get a minor point release of the kernel here on this update. Remember, it's a rolling release distribution. So you're gonna get things like the kernel updating. We're on a static release, stable release. Distribution, oftentimes you don't get kernel updates. Now let's talk about installing programs that are not already on the system. I'm gonna do a XBPS, I can spell it right. XBPS-install, name of package. I wonder if Htop is installed. Let's check before I actually run anything. Htop is not installed. So let's do a HBPS. I always wanna mistype that for some reason. Space, Htop, failed to lock. I don't know why I keep forgetting the sudo password. What are you doing, DT? You need sudo privileges. And that installation of Htop really took like a second. That was a very fast install. And wow, just checking system resource usage here. You can see we're not really using any CPU, which we're not doing anything. The CPU really shouldn't be text at all. But memory, how much RAM are we using? 358 megs of RAM of the six gigs of RAM I gave this VM. That is about as light as you're ever going to get for a full desktop environment like XFCE. That is extremely light. So there's really not much installed on this. There's not a whole lot of background processes running right now. All right, that's about as slim as you're going to get for a GNU slash Linux distribution. One other XBPS command you need to know about is XBPS-query, which obviously is a search for programs, searching for available programs in the repo. We could do XBPS-query-capitalR lowercase s and then name of program. Let's see if Qtile is in the void repos. And Qtile is there, very nice. They actually have Qtile separated into two packages, Qtile and Qtile-Wailin. That's interesting because usually on most distributions it's just one package. Qtile, when you install Qtile, you get both the X11 Qtile and the Wailin version of Qtile. So let's talk a little bit about the init system so they don't use systemd, they use runit on void. If I do a where is systemd, there's probably some systemd libraries, you know, things like eLoginD, and there may be some minor components to systemd on the system, but you can see there is no userbin systemd, right? So there's no binary of systemd. So there's no program that is systemd that is running on the system, right? But if I do a where is runit, you can see I do have a userbin runit. So runit is the init system. Typically with your init systems, the main thing you're doing is checking on the status of services, starting services, stopping services. And for runit, they have this command as SV for services, obviously. So I could do probably need to be root. So let's go ahead. I'm not gonna make this a sudo mistake again. So let's do a sudo SV. Let's check on the status of something SSHD, for example, the SSH daemon. And it is running. So it's already enabled and running that particular service. A few other important SV commands would be SV and then up name of service. So that obviously starts the service. SV down name of service that would stop the service. And as the restart name of service would of course restart the service. Some other things I wanna check while I'm in the terminal, let's do a quick where is pipe wire just to see if pipe wire is around. And it is, you can see we've got userbin pipe wire. So pipe wire is available for us. I'm gonna go ahead and close out the terminal since there really isn't much to look at as far as the desktop and suite of applications. There's very little installed on the system. Last thing I wanna check are wallpapers just in case we have any cool wallpapers that I wanna take a look at. And it just looks like standard XFCE wallpapers. Nothing else to look at default, you know, mouse wallpapers, the mouse mascot for XFCE. Really nothing else to look at. What is this one here? That's pretty cool, XFCE, the mouse, the name of the desktop XFCE. But I do like that bit of artwork there. Whoever created that did a really nice job. But for me, I'm not really crazy about any of these wallpapers. I think I would just go with the default. So no wallpaper packs installed. But I bet VoidLinux probably has some extra wallpaper packs in the repos. I wonder, since we did the XBPS-query command earlier, let's go ahead, dash RS, and let's do a search for backgrounds. Any packages that have the word backgrounds in their name. And you can see GNOME dash backgrounds and MATE dash backgrounds. Those are the default wallpaper packs for the GNOME desktop environment and the MATE desktop environment. Still, you know, default wallpaper packs, but at least you'll have a little bit more variety. The GNOME wallpaper pack especially is actually quite nice. So that was a very quick and cursory look at the latest version of VoidLinux. It was just released a few days ago. That's VoidLinux 6.6.21, although VoidLinux is a rolling release. And if you want fresher releases, there's actually a VoidBuilds website that keeps unofficial images of VoidLinux. That way, you know, if it's been a few months since the official Void release, there is a community site called voidbuilds.xyz, I believe is the name of the URL where they keep up-to-date builds of the various desktop editions of VoidLinux. That way, you're never having to reinstall from an old ISO because with rolling release distros, you never want an ISO to be too old that you're installing from because chances are, you know, it's not gonna work if the ISO is more than, say, a month or two old. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Gabe James, Matt, Paul, Steve, Wes, Arkotic, Armor Dragon, Commander, Angry, Darloff, George, Lee, Matthew, Methos, Nate, Erion, Paul, Peace, Archon, Fedora, Realitease, Relious, Red Prophet, Roland, Solastry, Tienren, Tools, Devil, Rewards, Into an Ubuntu, and Willy. These guys, they're my high-steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at VoidLinux would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and wanna see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.