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Slackware and Arch are still very much alive as projects. By 'successor' do you mean 'works in a similar way and I happen to like it better' or is there someth

Slackware and Arch are still very much alive as projects. By 'successor' do you mean 'works in a similar way and I happen to like it better' or is there something that you think Void has got that slackware and arch don't have? PS: downloading the void live .iso now for a bit of distro-hopping on a spring morning.

nicklaf 9y ago
As someone who switched from Slackware to Void several months ago, Void boots far faster. Also, though I haven't used Arch, Void really feels like a combination of a slimmed down Slackware + NetBSD (the author of Void is a NetBSD commiter IIRC). Of course, Gentoo portage was inspired by BSD ports, which I believe was an impetus for Arch's package manager. I don't know what the story is for Arch, but I find that Void strives to make the system dead simple: it is even more minimalist than Slackware (it feels more like a BSD). It isn't just small, though: it has good defaults. There isn't a whole lot of documentation beyond the well-written man pages, and I believe this is in part because it isn't necessary. Like Arch, though, it is a rolling release system: an update may break your system, and package indices quickly become stale as old packages are deleted from the server. You can easily fix this by updating the index.
- Vaelatern 9y ago
  Our initial author, and the primary author of xbps, came directly from the NetBSD community.
  - keithpeter 9y ago
    Installed on an old Thinkpad X61s from the xfce4 live .iso (< 600Mb) dd'ed to a usb stick. Boots into an xfce live graphical session with network-manager recognising the Atheros wifi card. Minimal install - xfce 4.12 plus Web browser and image viewer (1.5Gb on hard drive). Ran the installer script from a terminal in the live session - result is an ncurses dialogue that walks you through the steps. Disk already partitioned and skipped the network set-up stage and selected install from local. Rebooted into (graphical, xfce4) installed system in a few minutes. Network manager up and running, needed to log-in to local wifi again. Probably because I skipped the network stage in the installer, I needed to set a repository for updates. echo 'repository=http://repo.voidlinux.eu/current/' \ > /etc/xbps.d/00-repository-main.conf (somewhat reminiscent of OpenBSD's 6.2 new installurl) Now installing some applications. LibreOffice is version 6 'fresh'. A bit like OpenBSD, installing Libreoffice brings a metric tonne of dependencies. Edit: you need to install alsa to get sound xbps-install alsa-utils gets you basic sound functionality. The 'stem matches package name' logic is very reminiscent of OpenBSD pkg_add (I've never used NetBSD).
    - nicklaf 9y ago
      It looks like you've already figured out some things like sound, wifi, and xbps, but: I found the following guide helpful in complementing the man pages: http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/void/voidtips.htm http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/void/voidtips.htm More articles on Void from the same author, including an install guide: http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/void/index.htm http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/void/index.htm
      - keithpeter 9y ago
        Thanks. I worked out that root defaults to /bin/sh before reading the voidtips page above. Also worth mentioning here that Firefox-esr (52) is installed by default from the xfce4 live iso. Firefox release (59) is also available as is Chromium (65). Some font-puggling is needed (fontconfig stuff) to get sub-pixel rendering. In all, quite nice. I'll see how long it takes me to break this.

nicklaf 9y ago

As someone who switched from Slackware to Void several months ago, Void boots far faster. Also, though I haven't used Arch, Void really feels like a combination of a slimmed down Slackware + NetBSD (the author of Void is a NetBSD commiter IIRC). Of course, Gentoo portage was inspired by BSD ports, which I believe was an impetus for Arch's package manager. I don't know what the story is for Arch, but I find that Void strives to make the system dead simple: it is even more minimalist than Slackware (it feels more like a BSD). It isn't just small, though: it has good defaults. There isn't a whole lot of documentation beyond the well-written man pages, and I believe this is in part because it isn't necessary. Like Arch, though, it is a rolling release system: an update may break your system, and package indices quickly become stale as old packages are deleted from the server. You can easily fix this by updating the index.

Vaelatern 9y ago
Our initial author, and the primary author of xbps, came directly from the NetBSD community.
- keithpeter 9y ago
  Installed on an old Thinkpad X61s from the xfce4 live .iso (< 600Mb) dd'ed to a usb stick. Boots into an xfce live graphical session with network-manager recognising the Atheros wifi card. Minimal install - xfce 4.12 plus Web browser and image viewer (1.5Gb on hard drive). Ran the installer script from a terminal in the live session - result is an ncurses dialogue that walks you through the steps. Disk already partitioned and skipped the network set-up stage and selected install from local. Rebooted into (graphical, xfce4) installed system in a few minutes. Network manager up and running, needed to log-in to local wifi again. Probably because I skipped the network stage in the installer, I needed to set a repository for updates. echo 'repository=http://repo.voidlinux.eu/current/' \ > /etc/xbps.d/00-repository-main.conf (somewhat reminiscent of OpenBSD's 6.2 new installurl) Now installing some applications. LibreOffice is version 6 'fresh'. A bit like OpenBSD, installing Libreoffice brings a metric tonne of dependencies. Edit: you need to install alsa to get sound xbps-install alsa-utils gets you basic sound functionality. The 'stem matches package name' logic is very reminiscent of OpenBSD pkg_add (I've never used NetBSD).
  - nicklaf 9y ago
    It looks like you've already figured out some things like sound, wifi, and xbps, but: I found the following guide helpful in complementing the man pages: http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/void/voidtips.htm http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/void/voidtips.htm More articles on Void from the same author, including an install guide: http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/void/index.htm http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/void/index.htm
    - keithpeter 9y ago
      Thanks. I worked out that root defaults to /bin/sh before reading the voidtips page above. Also worth mentioning here that Firefox-esr (52) is installed by default from the xfce4 live iso. Firefox release (59) is also available as is Chromium (65). Some font-puggling is needed (fontconfig stuff) to get sub-pixel rendering. In all, quite nice. I'll see how long it takes me to break this.