13 January, 2020

Five days in a TTY

I installed KISS Linux

   This new semester has been pretty easy on me, so far. I hardly every
   have any classes (again, so far), and I've a ton of free time on my
   hands. This calls for -- yep---a distro hop!

Why KISS?

   [1]KISS has been making rounds on the interwebz lately.^[2]1 The Hacker
   News post spurred quite the discussion. But then again, that is to be
   expected from Valleybros who use macOS all day. :^)

   From the website,

     An independent Linux® distribution with a focus on simplicity and
     the concept of "less is more". The distribution targets only the
     x86-64 architecture and the English language.

   Like many people did in the HN thread, "simplicity" here is not to be
   confused with "ease". It is instead, simplicity in terms of lesser and
   cleaner code -- no [3]Poetterware.

   This, I can get behind. A clean system with less code is like a clean
   table. It's nice to work on. It also implies security to a certain
   extent since there's a smaller attack surface.

   The [4]kiss package manager is written is pure POSIX sh, and does just
   enough. Packages are compiled from source and kiss automatically
   performs dependency resolution. Creating packages is ridiculously easy
   too.

   Speaking of packages, all packages -- both official & community repos
   -- are run through shellcheck before getting merged. This is awesome; I
   don't think this is done in any other distro.

   In essence, KISS sucks less.

Installing KISS

   The [5]install guide is very easy to follow. Clear instructions that
   make it hard to screw up; that didn't stop me from doing so, however.

Day 1

   Although technically not in a TTY, it was still not in the KISS system
   -- I'll count it. I'd compiled the kernel in the chroot and decided to
   use efibootmgr instead of GRUB. efibootmgr is a neat tool to modify the
   Intel Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI). Essentially, you boot the
   .efi directly as opposed to choosing which boot entry you want to boot,
   through GRUB. Useful if you have just one OS on the system. Removes one
   layer of abstraction.

   Adding a new EFI entry is pretty easy. For me, the command was:
efibootmgr --create
           --disk /dev/nvme0n1 \
           --part 1 \
           --label KISS Linux \
           --loader /vmlinuz
           --unicode 'root=/dev/nvme0n1p3 rw'  # kernel parameters

   Mind you, this didn't work the first time, or the second, or the third
   ... a bunch of trial and error (and asking on #kisslinux) later, it
   worked.

   Well, it booted, but not into KISS. Took a while to figure out that the
   culprit was CONFIG_BLK_DEV_NVME not having been set in the kernel
   config. Rebuild & reboot later, I was in.

Day 2

   Networking! How fun. An ip a and I see that both USB tethering
   (ethernet) and wireless don't work. Great. Dug around a bit -- missing
   wireless drivers was the problem. Found my driver, a binary .ucode from
   Intel (eugh!). The whole day was spent in figuring out why the kernel
   would never load the firmware. I tried different variations -- loading
   it as a module (=m), baking it in (=y) but no luck.

Day 3

   I then tried Alpine's kernel config but that was so huge and had a ton
   of modules and took far too long to build each time, much to my
   annoyance. Diffing their config and mine was about ~3000 lines! Too
   much to sift through. On a whim, I decided to scrap my entire KISS
   install and start afresh.

   For some odd reason, after doing the exact same things I'd done
   earlier, my wireless worked this time. Ethernet didn't, and still
   doesn't, but that's ok.

   Building xorg-server was next, which took about an hour, mostly thanks
   to spotty internet. The build went through fine, though what wasn't was
   no input after starting X. Adding my user to the input group wasn't
   enough. The culprit this time was a missing xf86-xorg-input package.
   Installing that gave me my mouse back, but not the keyboard!

   It was definitely not the kernel this time, because I had a working
   keyboard in the TTY.

Day 4 & Day 5

   This was probably the most annoying of all, since the fix was trivial.
   By this point I had exhausted all ideas, so I decided to build my
   essential packages and setup my system. Building Firefox took nearly 9
   hours, the other stuff were much faster.

   I was still chatting on IRC during this, trying to zero down on what
   the problem could be. And then:
<dylanaraps> For starters I think st fails due to no fonts.

   Holy shit! Fonts. I hadn't installed any fonts. Which is why none of
   the applications I tried launching via sowm ever launched, and hence, I
   was lead to believe my keyboard was dead.

Worth it?

   Absolutely. I cannot stress on how much of a learning experience this
   was. Also a test of my patience and perseverance, but yeah ok. I also
   think that this distro is my endgame (yeah, right), probably because
   other distros will be nothing short of disappointing, in one way or
   another.

   Huge thanks to the folks at #kisslinux on Freenode for helping me
   throughout. And I mean, they really did. We chatted for hours on end
   trying to debug my issues.

   I'll now conclude with an obligatory screenshot.

   scrot
     __________________________________________________________________

    1. [6]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21021396

References

   1. https://getkiss.org/
   2. https://icyphox.sh/home/icy/leet/site/build/blog/five-days-tty/temp.html#fn:hn
   3. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=poetterware
   4. https://github.com/kisslinux/kiss
   5. https://getkiss.org/pages/install
   6. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21021396