Chimera Linux in virt-manager with Plasma and Wayland
Want to try something really different?
Chimera Linux have just released new images as of 4/12/24.
Chimera is a new distro build from scratch using
- Linux kernel 6.12
- core tools from FreeBSD
- apk package system from Alpine
- Clang/LLVM toolchain
- Musl C library
- Gnome and Plasma desktops with Wayland &/or X11
- multiple architectures - Intel/AMD, ARM AArch64, POWER, and RISC-V
- the
dinitinit system
A real mix. One could debate whether it is Linux with a BSD userland or BSD with a Linux kernel.
The real point is it is an independent distro like Solus and Void ā¦ it does not belong to any family.
The downloads are available here
https://repo.chimera-linux.org/live/latest/
I used chimera-linux-x86_64-LIVE-20241204-plasma.iso
There is extensive documentation available here
My install experience
The download was simple. Go to
https://repo.chimera-linux.org/live/latest/
and click on the image you want . I chose chimera-linux-x86_64-LIVE-2024-plasma.iso.
There are also gnome and base.
Base is without any DE. If you do not want Gnome or Plasma, you can start with base and add any of enlightenment, sway, wayfire, labwc, pekwm, icewm, or kde1
I did a VM install using virt-manager. The only additional hardware needed ( over the default) was a USB Mouse, and USB keyboard.
It looks as follows
That is a typical barebones KDE desktop.
Now the big shock! There is no install script. You have to do it yourself using Linux CLI, but, the instructions in the help document found here
are excellent.
Install steps
Starting with the live system
-
Open a terminalā¦ it is called Konsole
-
Partition the disk. In my case the virtual disk ( /dev/vda)
I used the KDE Partiton Manager ā¦ it looks like Gparted with a few
modifications. I made a GPT partition table and 3 partitionsā¦
EFI, bios-grub, and /.
- Make a place in the live system to mount the install partition (vda3)
and mount it.
mkdir /media/root
mount /dev/vda3 /media/root
- Also mount the EFI partiton
mkdir -p /media/root/boot/efi
mount /dev/vda1 /media/root/boot/efi
- Use the
chimera-bootstrapprogram to copy all the system files to the install directory
chimera-bootstrap -l /media/root
- Chroot into the install directory
chimera-chroot /media/root
- Do an update. You have to use the
apkpackage system
apk update
apk upgrade --available
It used 14Mb of extra disk space.
- Make an /etc/fstab file. Chimera has a special program to do that
genfstab / >> /etc/fstab
- Make a new initramfs
update-initramfs -c -k all
- Add grub. I originally intended to do an UEFI boot so I did
apk add grub-x86_64-efi
- Install grub
mkdir -p /boot/efi
mount /dev/vda1 /boot/efi
grub-install --efi-directory=/boot/efi \
--target=x86_64-efi
That failed ??? I think because I had virt-manager set to bios-boot.
So I change to
apk add grub-i386-pc
grub-install /dev/vda
That was OK
- Setup a user and change root password
useradd nevj
passwd nevj
usermod -a -G wheel,kvm nevj
passwd root
- Give it a hostname
echo chimeraplasma >> /etc/hostname
- Setup timezone
ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Sydney /etc/localtime
- Shutdown and reboot
reboot
Unfortunalely it does not boot, I get this
grub>
That means I forgot somethingā¦ after grub-install I should have done update-grub to construct the grub.cfg file.
So I have to figure out how to boot from the grub> prompt
First I need to know disk and partition names
So the root filesystem is, in grub notation, (hd0,gpt3) and in linux notation /dev/vda3. Now do this
grub> set root=(hd0,gpt3)
grub> linux /boot/vmlinuz=-6.12.5-0-generic root=/dev/vda3
grub> initrd /boot/initrd.img-6.12.5-0-generic
grub> boot
and it boots.
I get to a console prompt
- Login at the console
Now the fun starts. It should look like this
but several times I have had to fiddle with virt-manager hardware configuration, adding or deleting usb-keyboard, to make it accept my login name and password.
- Start the DE
I have to look in /bin to find what to use to start Plasma
The script I need is
/bin/startplasma-wayland
Run that and I get the DE
I have a DE with Konsole terminal window.
So, the install is successful, I now have to configure.
Configuring Chimera
- Getting a network connection
There are no interfaces configured. The Konqueror browser is present but it cannot communicate with the internet.
I need to find something to configure interfaces. There is nothing in the System settings menu. A search withapkgives
So both dhcpcd and NetworkManager are present, but neither is running.
I decide to use dhcpcd, so I have to use dinit to start the dhcpcd daemon
# dinitctl enable dhcpcd
Service 'dhcpcd' has been enabled.
Service 'dhcpcd' started.
#
Simple as that. I dont need to configure itā¦ dhcpcd finds the virtual machine gateway and sets up the link with dhcp.
Now the browser works.
- Getting a login manager
The console login is a little inconvenient, especially when the VM hardware needs to be fiddled. I can avoid it by setting up a login manager.
The login managersddmis already installed.
There seem to be several packagesā¦ all installed.
dinit seems to be configured like in Artixā¦ a management package for
each daemon ( service).
The Chimera documentation tells me to do this
# dinitctl enable sddm
and as soon as I do that, the sddm Login Manager screen appears.
chimerasddmscreen.png
but when I then login, I get a blank display. If I CtrlC I get back to the login manager, and from there I can sutdown and reboot. Then after reboot I get the Login Manager screen and the login worksā¦ I drop straight into Plasma.
Now it is starting to look like a normal distro.
- Communication.
I can ssh or sftp into the host.
If I want to ssh into the Chimera VM I will need to startsshd
That is easy
# dinitctl enable sshd
That is all. The packages openssh and openssh-dinit were already installed.
- Personalizing the Plasma screen
Under System Settings there is a Quick Settings menu where I can choose my favourite wallpaper and set a dark theme
and I can set my normal āfocus follows mouseā setting.
I have never done anything elaborate with Plasma, and I have never had Wayland before, so I cant really test it. It is Plasma version 6.2.4 KDE Frameworks Version 6.9.0 Qt version 6.8.1.
The window manager is Kwin version 6.2.4
- Copy/paste
Hang on, I cant copy/paste in and out of the VM?
I needspice-vdagentinstalled
OK, it is there now?
I still need to start the daemon
after a reboot I get
That looks right , but I still cant copy/paste in and out of the VM.
I think spice may not work properly with Waylandā¦ it needs Xorg server.
I install xwayland , and xserver-xorg .
Then I get a choice of DEās on the login screen
and if I choose Plasma(X11) copy/paste works, but if I choose Plasma(Wayland) it does not work. So spice-vdagent does not work with wayland yet, not even with xwayland installedā¦
The other choice (Weston) gives me a blank screen with a Wayland terminal and nothing else!
Copy/paste does not work there either.
There were lots of reboots testing the above, and I have to say Chimera is the fastest booting VM I have ever encountered. Dinit is a fast simple init system. Shutown is less than 1 second, boot is about 3 seconds.
Notes on Chimeraās mix of features
Why would anyone take core utilities from BSD, a package system from Alpine, the LLVM toolchain, the MUSL library ( alternative to glibc) and the almost unused ādinitā init system, and integrate them into a distro using a modern Linux kernel?
There is only one answer. It is way too much work to be a fun topic or a challenge. It has to be because the Chimera team really believe each of the above choices is the best available. So why not make a distro that combines the best ov every world.
Let us look at each of these features and try and see why it might be considered superior.
The BSD core utilities
We are talking about the basic Unix CLI commands. Things like cat, chmod, chroot, cp, dd, du, df, echo, ln, ls, mv, pr, rm, sort, tee, uniq, wc, and lots more, plus larger programs like awk, grep, sed, tar that were in the original Unix.
In BSD they come as part of the OS. In Linux they are addon packages, usually from GNU.
Let us look at the simple command ācatā . Its Linux man page starts like this
NAME
cat - concatenate files and print on the standard output
SYNOPSIS
cat [OPTION]... [FILE]...
DESCRIPTION
Concatenate FILE(s) to standard output.
With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.
-A, --show-all
equivalent to -vET
-b, --number-nonblank
number nonempty output lines, overrides -n
-e equivalent to -vE
-E, --show-ends
display $ at end of each line
-n, --number
number all output lines
-s, --squeeze-blank
suppress repeated empty output lines
-t equivalent to -vT
-T, --show-tabs
display TAB characters as ^I
-u (ignored)
-v, --show-nonprinting
use ^ and M- notation, except for LFD and TAB
--help display this help and exit
--version
output version information and exit
However the BSD version is like this
First thing to noticeā¦ the BSD version of cat has no long options with a double minus ( ie like --show-all).
There are some other subltle differences, not discernable from the man pages
- BSD utilities are stable. The flags do not change over time
- the BSD code is tidy and readable. GNU code is infamously cluttered and hard to read.
- the BSD licence is more permissive, there is no copyleft provision.
One does not have to go to Chimera or BSD to use the BSD utilities. Debian has a package called ābsdutilsā .
So why did Chimera choose BSDutils? I think the above points make it clear.
APK package system
The acronym APK stands for āAlpine Package Keeperā. Apk is used in Alpine Linux. Apk packages have the .apk filename extension, and this is not to be confused with Android packages, which also have the .apk filename extension.
Apk is documented here
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_Package_Keeper
and there are hints about using it here
https://docs.alpinelinux.org/user-handbook/0.1a/Working/apk.html
We have already used it in this document to do system updates, and to add the grun package. It is easy to learn ā¦ simpler than the familiar Debian apt system.
There is a directory /etc/apk
and the subdirectory repositories.d contains
so Chimera has its own repository for .apk files.
It also uses flatpaks, which are accessible via the KDE Discover app.
The file world contains a list of all installed packages
The file āarchā records the architecture.
$cat arch
x86_64
$
Chimera is available for x86_64, ppc64, ppc64le, aarch64, riscv64 architectures.
The Chimera apk repository is dependent on Alpine. When Alpine has a new release, the repository path will change. You can edit /etc/apt/repositories.d/00-repo-main.list and run apk upgrade --available , to shift to a newer repo.
Downgrading packages to older versions is not supported.
You can find what is available in Alpine packages here
https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages
When it comes to using packages, Chimera is essentially the same as using Alpine.
The Clang/LLVM toolchain
The Linux kernel included in Chimera is built with the Clang/LLVM toolchain and the MUSL libc library. That makes it somewhat different from most Linux kernels which are built with gcc, binutils, and glibc.
More on kernel building here
https://docs.kernel.org/kbuild/llvm.html
We need to understand what these new compiler tools are and why they might be better than the traditional tools.
- Clang is a new C compiler. It provides a C and C++ language frontend for LLVM. It supposedly supports all the extensions and features of gcc, while remaining fast and light.
- LLVM is a whole set of compilers and toolchain programs. So it encompasses all the build tools used for the compile, link and execute steps in making a program run file. It is more than that, it is designed to make programs portable across architectures, which it achieves by compiling to a standardized assembler language for a virtual machine. It facilitates graphics code with OpenGL. It supports C, C++, Fortran, Julia, Rust, and several other languages.
The best way to learn about this toolchain is to try compiling some user programs.
I have a small C program called folli.c
$ ls
Makefile folli.c folli.h folli.scr
It consists of one .c file , a header file folli.h, a script to run it folli.scr and a Makefile to compile it.
The Makefile is simple
# Makefile for folli.c
SRC = folli.c
INCLUDESRC = folli.h
OBJ = folli.o
CC = gcc
HOMEDIR = .
BINDIR = .
SRCDIR = $(HOMEDIR)/Folli
MANDIR = .
LIBS = -lm
CFLAGS = -v -g -static
folli: $(OBJ)
gcc -o folli $(OBJ) $(LIBS)
test: folli.scr
sh -ex folli.scr >&out
clean:
rm *.o
folli.o : folli.h
The above is as it stands for a compile in Void Linux ( or most GNU/Linuxes) .
It will need modification in Chimera.
So lets see if we can find the tools in Chimera.
Nothing there!. No make, no compiler,ā¦
So it does not install with build tools by default.
We will have to find and install them with apk
Search for make
chimeramake.png
So it is available but not installed ā¦ bmake is the BSD version gmake is the GNU version.
So lets try bmake
Now we need to clean up the makefile
and try to run it
So, obviously, I needto install clang
notice it installs llvm-binutils and musl-devl as well
Now try again
Clearly clang wants a type specifier in the C code. In Void Linux with gcc you get a warning. Clang is more strict.
o I add the int type to the main() statement in the C code, and
That is a successful compile. folli.o , the object file is present, and there is an executable called folli.
Lets see if it runs
$ sh ./folli.scr
number of primary sites 2000000
So/P ratio 3.00
growthrate - slope of log_wt/log_age line 4.30345
growth intercept - of log_wt/log_age line 0.0000020170
follicle initiation rate - increase per timeincrement per cm sq 450.0000
time of start of primary follicle initiation period 64
time of start of secondary original follicle initiation period 86
number of founder cells at time zero 100000000.0
average number of cells per p,so,sd follicle 35.000 33.000 30.000
time foll pfoll sofoll sdfoll diffoundcel foundcel wght surfarea folirate celbrate d pd sod sdd sd rat
between P and So periods
61 0 0 0 0 0 107054834 97.2 190.3 85633 0.07055 0 0 0 0 0 0.0
between P and So periods
.... snip .....
299 27069651 2171768 6543389 18354494 842578546 0 90914.0 18196.9 8188583 0.01439 1488 119 360 1009 1368 11.5
out of founder cells
300 27069651 2171768 6543389 18354494 842578546 0 92229.7 18372.0 8267400 0.01434 1473 118 356 999 1355 11.5
adult S+P density per cm sq = 2572
adult P density per cm sq = 206
adult So density per cm sq = 622
adult Sd density per cm sq = 1744
adult S density per cm sq = 2365
adult S/P ratio = 11.5
p interval = 14
so interval = 18
$
It runs successfully, the output is correct. What it is doing is modelling the development of wool follicles.
The executable file is an ELF file
$ file folli
folli: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-musl-x86_64.so.1, BuildID[sha1]=bc6367d94b8572a9fdeadf1628fc9b6e389b764a, with debug_info, not stripped
$
$ ls -l folli
-rwxr-xr-x 1 nevj nevj 17752 Jan 1 16:32 folli
Slightly different from the one made in Void with the GNU compiler toolchain
$ file folli
folli: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, BuildID[sha1]=a80de8ce5929bfd25492ab505c8d1277b5c44b11, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, with debug_info, not stripped
ls -l ~/Folli/folli
-rwxr-xr-x 1 nevj nevj 28344 Dec 31 21:29 /home/nevj/Folli/folli
Notice it is dynamically linked to MUSL libraries.
Notice also the executable file produced with clang is dramatically smaller than that produced with gcc?
That is strangeā¦the object files (folli.o) are similar in size
gcc
ls -l ~/Folli/folli.o
-rw-r--r-- 1 nevj nevj 15992 Dec 31 21:29 /home/nevj/Folli/folli.o
clang
ls -l folli.o
-rw-r--r-- 1 nevj nevj 18544 Jan 1 16:32 folli.o
I looked at them with nm , they have the same symbols, but the clang one has some extra symbols.
That is on very elementary look at Clang/LLVM/musl. I must go on and try a more complicated build. I need to also try Fortran under LLVM. But not here.
There is not much to say about MUSL. It is documented here
It has static linking, which is important in embedded applications. Both muls and glibc are implementations of the standard C library.
The dinit init system
There is an easy introduction to dinit in the Chimera documentation
The web page is here
https://davmac.org/projects/dinit/
and the github page
also provides good documentation.
Dinit provides an init process, service management, and supervision. It can launch multiple services in parallel, and that makes it fast. Boot time for Chimera in my VM is about 3 seconds. It is written in C++ and is compatable across BSD, MasOS, and Linux.
Dinit is not considered to be part of the daemontools family of init systems ( daemontools, runit, s6, 66). Dinit does not start a separate process to supervice each daemon. There seems to be one supervision process called dinit-monitor that monitors all services. there is also one process called dinit that replaces init as process No. 1. , and manages shutdowns and reboots. As such, it is really the simplest of all init systems except BSD RC.
Dinit is easier to use than runit. Its service management commands are similar to OpenRC. It is a small learning curve ā¦ half an hour will get you there.
Problems
- Sometimes if I click on the Menu button in the bottom panel, I get a completely blank background
and the only way out is a shutdown and reboot. It happens with both X11 and Wayland. I am not sure if this is a VM issue or a Chimera issue.
Further searching reveals that it is an X11 issue. The problem only appeared in Wayland after I added the xwayland package. So I removed the xwayland package, and the problem disappears in Wayland/Plasma, but it is still there in X11/Plasma.
So I went looking for parts of X11 not installed and found the package
xserver-xorg-xephyr which is concerened with āX server outputting to a window on a pre-existing displayā. Installing that package fixed the problem in X11/Plasma.
So now I went and reinstalled the xwayland package and Wayland/Plasm still works ( no blank screen on touching menu button)
So I think the problem is solved. It was caused by starting with the Plasma/Wayland, then adding X11 and forgetting to add needed components.
- Spice-vdagent does not seem to work in Plasma/Wayland, but it works in Plasma/X11.
In both Wayland and X11, the required daemons are running
$ ps ax | grep spice
499 ? Ssl 0:00 /usr/bin/spice-vdagentd -x
969 ? Ssl 0:00 /usr/bin/spice-vdagent
I suspect that vdagent does not communicate properly with Wayland, because Wayland has no server daemon for it to communicate with. Even the presence of xwayland is not enough for vdagent to work in PLasma/Wayland.
This i a spice-vdagent problem. It would happen with any Wayland DE. Not unique to Chimera.
Conclusion
My overall feeling is that Chimera is a well planned attempt to create a distro that uses the best bits and pieces from a number of areas.
In particular the apk package system is at least as good as Debianās apt and is less cluttered, and the dinit init system is fast and simple.
The Clang/LLVM/MUSL toolchain worked for me as a user, and there does not seem to be anything wrong with the Linux kernel compiled with it.
I have no idea what the driver situation is, because I used a VM, but it is a Linux kernel so it should have all the driver modules every Linux kernel has.
The big hurdle for new users is the absence of an install script. You just use commands in the live Chimera. The documentation is great. Anyone could follow the steps, and Chimera help by providing a couple of critical utilities
chimera-bootstrap , chimera-chroot and genfstab. Dont be scared off by the install.
Chimera uses musl libc. That means that proprietary apps that require glibc will not work as package installs or downloaded binaries. They will work if containerized ( eg flatpaks). The benefit of MUSL is cleaner code and a better toolchain for developers.
Chimera is itself available as a container image chimeralinux/chimera in Docker Hub. It should make a nice lightweight container image, similar to AlpineLinux. I have not tested the container image.
Chimera only started in 2021, and it did not reach an Alpha Release until 2023. This current release is a Beta. Give it a chance. It is on the way to becoming a mature, independent distro with an interesting combination of sources.
