Installation

This section includes general information about the process of installing Void. For specific guides, see the "Advanced Installation" section.

Base system requirements

Void can be installed on very minimalist hardware, though we recommend the following minimums for most installations:

Note that flavor installations require more resources; how much more depends on the flavor.

Void is not available for the i386, i486, or i586 architectures.

Before installing musl Void, please read the "musl" section of this Handbook, so that you are aware of software incompatibilities.

It is highly recommended to have a network connection available during install to download updates, but this is not required. ISO images contain installation data on-disk and can be installed without network connectivity.

Downloading installation media

The most recent live images and rootfs tarballs can be downloaded from https://alpha.de.repo.voidlinux.org/live/current/. They can also be downloaded from other mirrors. Previous releases can be found under https://alpha.de.repo.voidlinux.org/live/, organized by date.

Verifying images

Each image release's directory contains two files used to verify the image(s) you download. First, there is a sha256.txt file containing image checksums to verify the integrity of the downloaded images. Second is the sha256.sig file, used to verify the authenticity of the checksums.

It is necessary to verify both the image's integrity and authenticity. It is, therefore, recommended that you download both files.

Verifying image integrity

You can verify the integrity of a downloaded file using sha256sum(1) with the sha256.txt file downloaded above. The following command will check the integrity of only the image(s) you have downloaded:

$ sha256sum -c --ignore-missing sha256.txt
void-live-x86_64-musl-20170220.iso: OK

This verifies that the image is not corrupt.

Verifying digital signature

Prior to using any image you're strongly encouraged to validate the signatures on the image to ensure they haven't been tampered with.

Current images are signed using a signify key that is specific to the release. If you're on Void already, you can obtain the keys from the void-release-keys package, which will be downloaded using your existing XBPS trust relationship with your mirror. You will also need a copy of signify(1); on Void this is provided by the outils package.

To obtain signify when using a Linux distribution or operating system other than Void Linux:

• Install the signify package in Arch Linux and Arch-based distros.
• Install the signify-openbsd package in Debian and Debian-based distros.
• Install the package listed here for your distribution.
• Install signify-osx with homebrew in macOS.

If you can't obtain signify for some reason (e.g. you are on Windows and can't use WSL or MinGW), you can use minisign(1) to verify the file.

If you are not currently using Void Linux, it will also be necessary to obtain the appropriate signing key from our Git repository here.

Once you've obtained the key, you can verify your image with the sha256.sig file. The following example demonstrates the verification of the GCP musl filesystem from the 20191109 release:

$ signify -C -p /etc/signify/void-release-20191109.pub -x sha256.sig void-GCP-musl-PLATFORMFS-20191109.tar.xz
Signature Verified
void-GCP-musl-PLATFORMFS-20191109.tar.xz: OK

If the verification process does not produce the expected "OK" status, do not use it! Please alert the Void Linux team of where you got the image and how you verified it, and we will follow up on it.

For verification with minisign, it is necessary to rename the sha256.sig file to sha256.txt.minisig and remove the first line from the .pub release key. The following example demonstrates the verification of the sha256.txt file from the 20191109 release:

$ minisign -Vm sha256.txt -f -p void-release-20191109.pub
void-release-20191109.pub: Success

The same warning as above applies. If the verification process isn't successful, do not use the file - warn the Void Linux team about it.