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.

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.