Void Linux in a Virtual Machine
December 2022
I wanted to try out Void Linux so I downloaded the void-live-x86_64-20221001-base.iso and set about to get it installed on a virtual machine. When I downloaded the iso I grabbed the sums file and it verified as OK. The documentation on the web site gives a good overview of the install process. When it came time to choose the Source of packages I didn't want to download updated packages from the network so I opted to use local to get packages from the install media. Everthing was ok until the last step. When installing Grub as a boot loader it threw an error that Grub could not be installed onto /dev/sda! and suggested to check tty0 for more information. I could not figure out how to access tty0 so I tried to redo the install to the same hd image by erasing partions and also increasing the ESP partion size from 100M to 300M, failed at Grub install again. So I deleted the virtual machine, created another, then tried downloading updated packages from the network on the next attempt; I also increased the ESP partion size to 500M. Same problem with Grub install. Getting a bit frustrated, I deleted the virtual machine and created a new one. This time during network initialization there was an error that the network was unreachable. Deleted the virtual machine to start again and ran into the same network issue, however the host system could connect to the network with no problem. So at this point I gave up and moved on.
Void Linux in a Virtual Machine Update 1
December 2022
I found an article that stated to boot Void Linux in VirtualBox or virt-manager you have to set the drive to use efi or you will get the grub error I experienced on my earlier attempts to install. They both have a setting you can turn on in their respective GUI. More searching found that you can use OVMF to load a Tiano Core efi environment with Qemu. A OVMF white paper linked on this KVM page suggested that you should copy the original file and rename it then use it to boot thereby preserving the boot environment variables for each machine, so I did that first. There is a lot of information in this white paper that is over my head, however it was helpful enough that I could boot with a Tiano Core efi envirovment. Now each time I tried to install I would get an error that /dev/sda2! could not be mounted and check tty0 for error messages. I tried to switch to the first virtual console with Ctl-Alt-F1 but it was captured by the host system every time and I still don't know how to access tty0 in the guest os. I tried deleting the virtual machine and creating another but I would still get the same error. No luck again, so I gave up until next time I feel like trying to solve this puzzle.