# journey into the Darkness

## Ch. 9: Beyond the Void

It had been a few years since I last read anything at systemd-free, so out of curiosity I went exploring to see what developments I'd missed. Apparently there was a lot that had happened in that time, some of which involved my dearly-beloved Void.  I won't get into too much detail but suffice it to say there was some drama which lead to the founder of Void and primary developer of xbps to leave the project.  This was rather concerning, as was the claim that Void had been silently deleting packages from the repository and even removing them from the machines of its users, without any notification.  This mainly involved elogind replacing consolekit-2, but I did notice nmap was no longer in the repository, nor was it on the Bolt anymore.  THAT was very alarming since I relied on nmap to find the IP address of my other computers when using SSH, so there was absolutely no reason why it should not be installed.  I cannot prove that it was deleted by the package manager, but it certainly seemed plausible since the 
Bolt had sat unused for two years and was updated just prior to reading about these changes.

In light of these developments and considering the other problems I was having with Void and the Linux kernel, the continued spread of systemd(evil) and the fear of it taking over all of Linux, I felt the need to once again explore alternative operating systems.  I'd even consider the possibly of leaving Linux for good.  Now I'll be the first to admit that this is probably a radical move, the overreaction of a paranoid mind which is already stressed enough as it is. It's been known to happen, the clambox home automation disaster is just one example of this.  After all, isn't it human nature to panic when something we hold so dear is facing the possibility of unwanted change? Void had been my home for six years and now I'm reading some things that gives the impression that it may be under threat.  Once I'd calmed down it would be decided to keep Void and watch the news to see if things got any worse. Really there was no reason for me to abandon ship unless it went the way of many others and adopted systemd as
 the One True Init.  Of course this wouldn't stop me from at least *trying* to get something else running on the Bolt or even a Raspberry Pi.

Once again I would try to install one of the BSDs on the Bolt, only to be disappointed despite having installed a new SSD.  NetBSD booted this time but would freeze up before it got to the installer.  FreeBSD also froze during boot when it reached something about ACPI.  Fiddling with the BIOS settings did not work, so I moved on to OpenBSD.  This surprised me by making full use of the new 12" monitor, but the default console font was terrible. It even made it to the installer but would freeze when trying to switch to the multiprocessor kernel.  Out of curiosity I tried booting into the installation which did seem to work until the time came to run rc.firstime, upon which it froze up...  Not to worry, I've got antiX!  Or not.  Turns out the antiX installer is brain damaged because it tries to select the flash drive from which it was booted as the installation disk.  Obarun wouldn't install either because of the notworking issue which strangely wasn't present the first time.

Even the Raspberry Pi wasn't much use since OpenBSD doesn't run on ARMv6, while FreeBSD lacked network support on the Pi Zero.  Oh I did try it, after all the Pi does have an Ethernet hat which doubles as a USB hub... It wasn't even detected, nor was the keyboard working.  NetBSD 9.3 was put on the 128GB microSD card since it appeared to support networking on the Pi Zero, but it took bloody ages to resize the file system.  During this time I noticed the Ethernet chip was detected and even had an IP address. FINALLY something was going my way, but of course the gods had other plans.

Apparently tmux didn't have colour support and didn't like my custom config file which remapped the ALT key as the modifier.  Even w3m refused to register the ALT key when trying to access the bookmarks page, while certain characters would be replaced with others which indicated some kind of problem with encoding. While I could probably survive without colors, having a non-functional ALT key is a serious detriment, while the ultimate deal-breaker was the fact that NetBSD refused to boot after the Pi was powered off, despite using the proper shutdown command.  Somehow the microSD card was corrupted and needed to be rewritten. What nonsense be this?

Eventually I gave up on the Pi and decided to try installing OpenIndianna on the Bolt, only to have the installer quit and request that I login to a maintenane shell...   That's alright, I'll just try OmniOS, a minimal operating system usingn the same illumos kernel.  That was quite a mistake since ALL of the software must be built manually and maintained by the user. While this seemed appealing at first, it quickly became clear how much of a dumb idea this was for someone who doesn't know enough about system administration to even get near such a thing as OmniOS.  While it did install without issues, the documentation is sparse and seems to either be a work in progress or it just assumes the user already knows Solaris. The package manager was quite annoying for two reasons; it's written in Python which makes it terribly slow, while the output is overly verbose yet strangely obtuse.  Make that three reasons; the package manager as whole was so obtuse that I had no idea just what the f#!k I needed to install.


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