Installation Guide
Once you have downloaded a Void image to install and prepared your install media, you are ready to install Void Linux.
Before you begin installation, you should determine whether your machine boots using BIOS or UEFI. This will affect how you plan partitions. See Partitioning Notes for more detail.
The following features are not supported by the installer script:
Booting
Boot your machine from the install media you created. If you have enough RAM, there is an option on the boot screen to load the entire image into ram, which will take some time but speed up the rest of the install process.
Once the live image has booted, log in as root
with password voidlinux
and
run:
# void-installer
The following sections will detail each screen of the installer.
Keyboard
Select the keymap for your keyboard; standard "qwerty" keyboards will generally use the "us" keymap.
Network
Select your primary network interface. If you do not choose to use DHCP, you will be prompted to provide an IP address, gateway, and DNS servers.
If you choose a wireless network interface, you will be prompted to provide the
SSID, encryption type (wpa
or wep
), and password. If void-installer
fails
to connect to your network, you may need to exit the installer and configure it
manually using wpa_supplicant and
dhcpcd before continuing.
Source
To install packages provided on the install image, select Local
. Otherwise,
you may select Network
to download the latest packages from the Void
repository.
Warning: If you are installing the desktop environment from the xfce image, you MUST choose
Local
for the source!
Hostname
Select a hostname for your computer (that is all lowercase, with no spaces.)
Locale
Select your default locale settings. This option is for glibc only, as musl does not currently support locales.
Timezone
Select your timezone based on standard timezone options.
Root password
Enter and confirm your root
password for the new installation. The password
will not be shown on screen.
User account
Choose a login (default void
) and a descriptive name for that login. Then
enter and confirm the password for the new user. You will then be prompted to
verify the groups for this new user. They are added to the wheel
group by
default and will have sudo
access. Default groups and their descriptions are
listed here.
Login names have some restrictions, as described in useradd(8).
Bootloader
Select the disk to install a bootloader on when Void is installed. You may
select none
to skip this step and install a bootloader manually after
completing the installation process. If installing a bootloader, you will also
be asked whether or not you want a graphical terminal for the GRUB menu.
Partition
Next, you will need to partition your disks. Void does not provide a preset
partition scheme, so you will need to create your partitions manually with
cfdisk(8). You will be prompted with a
list of disks. Select the disk you want to partition and the installer will
launch cfdisk
for that disk. Remember you must write the partition table to
the drive before you exit the partition editor.
If using UEFI, it is recommended you select GPT for the partition table and
create a partition (typically between 200MB-1GB) of type EFI System
, which
will be mounted at /boot/efi
.
If using BIOS, it is recommended you select MBR for the partition table. Advanced users may use GPT but will need to create a special BIOS partition for GRUB to boot.
See the Partitioning Notes for more details about partitioning your disk.
Filesystems
Create the filesystems for each partition you have created. For each partition
you will be prompted to choose a filesystem type, whether you want to create a
new filesystem on the partition, and a mount point, if applicable. When you are
finished, select Done
to return to the main menu.
If using UEFI, create a vfat
filesystem and mount it at /boot/efi
.
Review settings
It is a good idea to review your settings before proceeding. Use the right arrow
key to select the settings button and hit <enter>
. All your selections will be
shown for review.
Install
Selecting Install
from the menu will start the installer. The installer will
create all the filesystems selected, and install the base system packages. It
will then generate an initramfs and install a GRUB2 bootloader to the bootable
partition.
These steps will all run automatically, and after the installation is completed successfully, you can reboot into your new Void Linux install!
Post installation
After booting into your Void installation for the first time, perform a system update.