[Guide] Enter the Void (Linux) on Rock5B

ROCK 5 Series
1

Hi!
I own several Rock 5B boards, building my personal cloud/homelab and a cyberdeck (long term projects).
Been working on building/setting up Void Linux as my main OS, thought why not to share it here :slight_smile: (this forum helped me a lot, thanks!).

This is a very compact desktop image with Hyprland window manager (tty terminal is being used as a login screen).

void
void1359×767 59.8 KB

Build description

  • kernel 6.10-rc1, in fact built from mainline collabora fork
  • GPU/mali drivers working (not sure about media libs though)
  • Only Radxa A8 Wi-Fi card is supported, try to install wifi-firmware to make others work, otherwise simply use wired connection.
  • runit instead of systemd
  • doas instead of sudo (added sudo as an alias, still works)
  • foot terminal
  • starship beautiful zsh prompt
  • dolphin file manager
  • zellij instead of tmux
  • yazi file manager (use yy to run it)
  • eza instead of ls (ls still works, but looks a bit fancier)
  • couple of other fancy tools, mostly terminal ones

Installation

Download the latest image version from here:

Install it to SD/EMMC/NVME using balenaEtcher or dd.

Follow the post install steps in README to set up network/user/etc. (worth checking Some tips section first).

Some tips

Installing packages: sudo xbps-install -Su {pkg name}.

In case if your’e not using vim (I’ve just started learning it myself :)), install nano as soon as network/internet is accessible.

Couple of Hyprland commands:
terminal - Win + T
file manager - Win + E
quit/kill active window - Win + K
switch workspace - Win + {number 1/2/3...}
open Run menu - Win + R
exit from Hyprland - Win + ESC

See others in ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf

Current functional state/readiness

To my knowledge only leftmost HDMI (near USB-C) works (waiting for collabora guys to make other ports work).

Haven’t tested on other boards (I don’t own any atm, but plan to purchase Rock5C to use as a client machine).

DISCLAIMER

WARNING: Use at your own risk!

I’ve created this repo only to be able to temporarily share the image.
In fact storing/building the whole thing on self-hosted git/fileserver (also Rock 5B with Void Linux) but it’s not production ready yet from both hardware and software perspective, but I plan to set up domain/proxy etc soon, so going to further share image/xbps packages from there directly (of course if anyone would be interested in using these at all :)).

I’ve never contributed to or maintained any open source projects and I don’t know yet how actively I’d maintain this one. But I plan to keep improving it further in the short term. Ideally I’d contribute directly to Void xbps repo (Raspberry Pis and even Rock64/Pinebook are officially supported there).

PS. Big thanks to Void, Collabora teams and others for making this build possible!

5 Likes
2

Awesome ! Good Sharing !

1 Like
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Are you gonna upload a mirror of the build framework to GitHub?

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I’ll share the links to my self-hosted git and fileserver once I set those up.

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Sound wasn’t working on initial one, fixed and uploaded new release

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