Thursday, September 25, 2014

Installing VoidLinux with Openbox

My aim is to create a setting like I am used to in Archbang.
I always prepare partitions before with Gparted. Use a liveCD that has it as application on ti to accomplish this.
Boot with the Voidlinux iso (downloadlink). The one I tried, 0.4 64bits, was only 180 MB.
Start installation  with the command
sudo void-installer
Set system keyboard (us is below at the botton). Set up Network: it will show that it works. Hostname, I choose: paulvoid. Set your locale: I always choose en_Gb although I am Dutch. Choose Timezone: in my case Europe/Amsterdam. Give your root password twice.

Set your bootloader to your hard drive;probably sda. I saw no possibility to install it in a specific partition of a hard drive. If you prefer to mount by default into a different partition, install grub again with "grub-install /dev/sda" (for instance) when you running  in that favourite partition after you have finished this all.

I have already set up my partitions so I can skip that. Now I configure  my flie systems to ext4 and swap, set my swap and root partition '"/" (Be careful: no space) and after all this configuration we can let the installation have its course. When done we reboot.

Post Installation Set up.
This is when we can decide how to fill in the basic Void installation.
We log in as root and with the root password given during installation.
First of all we do a system update with:
#xbps-install -Syu
We install nano for easy shell editing for those of us who don't  like/know vi:
#xbps-install nano
(Nano basic commands: Ctr+o write and type enter;Ctr+x to exit an do enter)
We check keyboard and location and hostname:
#nano /etc/rc.conf
#nano /etc/hostname
It shows Juan, Voids main dev is from Spain (Madrid). I had to correct that again. Create timezone link:
#ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Amsterdam /etc/localtime
We now add some basic programs:
#xbps-install xorg zip unzip p7zip alsa-utils gvfs udisks2 polkit-gnome
Time to create  a user, my user name will be paul:
#useradd -m -g wheel -s /bin/bash paul
Give our user password:
#passwd paul
and give our new user password twice.
We already have us made part of the wheel group; now we can add new groups if necessary and ourselves to it. For example:
#groupadd networkmanager
I added myself to the groups audio,video, storage, optical. Adding me as user to a group like this:
#gpasswd -a paul audio
To check to which groups you as user belong do:
$ groups paul

Now it is time to tell runit to run some services:
#ln -s /etc/sc/dhcpcd /var/service/ 
And
#ln -s /etc/sv/NetworkManager /var/service/
Check active services:#cd /var/service     and   #ls


Now we are going to install our window manager and basic applications:
#xbps-install openbox dmenu xterm leafpad geany firefox volumeicon tint2 lxdm network-manager-applet nitrogen obconf lxappearance pcmanfm spacefm udevil
Set up lxdm:
#nano /etc/lxdm/lxdm.conf
For instance "autologin=paul" and "session=/usr/bin/openbox-session"
Now we are gonna work as user and reboot and login as user or open another terminal with ctrl+alt+f3.
We are going to copy the skeleton files for openbox:
$cp /etc/skel/.xinitrc ~
Note that we are now acting as user and not as root.
And change # exec gnome-session to exec openbox-session with
$nano ~/.xinitrc
Copy more skel files:
$ mkdir -p ~/.config/openbox
$ cp -R /etc/xdg/openbox/* ~/.config/openbox
Put in /.config/openbox/autostart
tint2 &
nitrogen --restore &
volumeicon -b &
devmon &

If you get an error with dbus:
dbus-uuidgen > /var/lib/dbus/machine-id
If udevil is causing problems you might have to do:
#chmod -s /usr/bin/udevil

Another problem might be a missing polkit rule; see for more info
https://github.com/voidlinux/documentation/wiki/Mounting-filesystem-as-a-user
At last some additional applications:
#xbps-install smplayer vlc  viewnior chromium
Use lxapperance and obconf to configure your Openbox set up.
Use geany to edit rc.xml and  put the close down program in the menu.xml, both are in ./config/openbox/ (see previous post)
You will have to set up Nitrogen after you downloaded some nice wallpaper. You might like to install a new icon set for instance oxygen-icons. And so on.

Add more repositories for xbps packet manager:
# xbps-install void-repo-nonfree void-repo-multilib void-repo-multilib-nonfree
After that you can  Install flashplugin:
xbps-install adobe-flash-plugin

If you want to see how xfce with Void is installed see this youtube video of Francois. I hope it works out well for you when you try. Success!
 


Wednesday, September 24, 2014

VoidLinux with runit instead of systemd

Voidlinux is even lighter than Archbang, my disto of choice for the last years.
Because it uses runit I was tempted to try it out. Till now I'am very positive about it. The most serious drawback that the choice of packages is more limited than Arch.

Why I find this an interesting distro: http://www.voidlinux.eu/

Apparently is an hybryd between Archlinux and gentoo, rolling release, packages are compiled from source (or binaries can be downloaded), pkgsrc (void linux's ebuild) resemble strongly archlinux PKGBUILDs but have some features inspired by gentoo ebuild without the bloat.
Wiki: https://github.com/voidlinux/documentation/wiki

On Google+ https://plus.google.com/communities/113949500587973059533
Search void packages: http://www.voidlinux.eu/#findpkg
XBPS source packages Manual:
https://github.com/voidlinux/void-packages/blob/master/Manual.md


Build your own iso: https://github.com/voidlinux/void-mklive
Nice video of Francois installing Voidlinux 0.34 wih XFCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00u7vV_4Mfg#t=348

Here on the void Wiki I found a nice python shutdown script that isn't pasted well and gives errors. This one did work for me.
I also needed this post to get my polkit well set up.
In a next post I will describe my installation process of Void plus Openbox.

Blog Archive