Void linux revisited – do not aVoid!

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We finally managed to get a box that was able to boot up the void live image (LXDE) that we were having problems with in the past.  So 48hrs later we are here to report on the experience.

This is the first distro that we are covering that relies on itself and not some other systemd infected distro.  The rest we have been following are either Debian or Arch based.  We did receive some heat for making a prejudicial comment in an earlier article, about void being related to Arch, or being similar at least.  Ok, maybe it made the wrong impression while running in a VM, but we don’t care too much about VM installations anyway, so we didn’t spend much time with it.  That command xbps-install -Suy just reminded us too much of pacman!  😉 Continue reading →

U/EFI secure boot and debian/microsoft-ization

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A short story: In recent years PCs have increasingly shifted from having a bios in charge of booting, whatever system can possibly boot from, to a system called EFI.  EFI in brief seeks a boot partition on disk that can be edited and filled with OS instructions on how the kernel of a system will be initialized and built.  A UEFI is a more specific form of an EFI that also introduces secure boot.  This means that only certain systems that are considered as “safe” can boot and such systems are certified and are issued a key (for a hefty fee of course). Continue reading →

Linux kernel 4.13 on Devuan and on Artix [Fixed]

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My test machine is an aging, stock (unmodified), mass produced enterprise grade, machine made by Dell.  Ever since my Manjaro days (Manjaro-OpenRC) when the first beta edition of Linux413 was released, it was the only kernel I have ever had problems with.*  It always appeared to boot fine and only when X was about to start all input devices would freeze.  Nothing in Xorg.0.log seemed to appear as an error.  The machine would just lock up and only mechanically could it be rebooted. Continue reading →

How to chroot properly in Artix and repair your installation

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I recently had a problem with all my Artix installations, as I had been away for a few days, I came back and decided to update them all. I had blind faith in Artix and its testing repositories and learned my lesson. It seems as I got caught within that period where updates were uploaded and mirrors were not fully synced. So all my upgrades seem to have been half done, even though it showed “all up to date nothing to do”. Glibc mkinitcpio, elongid, etc. were not all of the same edition and the kernel images produced were unbootable. Continue reading →

mkinitcpio -P – fix your Artix kernel

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If you recently installed Artix and you run into any problems that may indicate hardware conflicts or inexistent configurations or have installed some other Kernel than the linux-lts which is the default, try this:

$ inxi -Fx

This will give you information about your discovered hardware.

 $ sudo mkinitcpio -P

While it is building a new image from the kernel for booting up your system you may see a warning such as this one:

==> WARNING: Possibly missing firmware for module: somechipname-xxxx

Continue reading →