Hello, world! Basically, what this will be, is a rant on how my ways of setting up Chimera don't work for some damn reason. I will be starting with the idea of how I believed everything would go:

The Idea / “What I believed wasn't true.”

For context, I have an SSD I got a while back of which I have only been using for backing up the main drive (where all this is hosted), and sometimes some ISOs I wanted to try out due to all my USBs being already in use. I have only recently said “It'd be cool to be able to switch between drives whenever I want to!”

Now, I can't quite say for certain the why I wanted to do such thing, (I myself do not know), but I did. I opened up the laptop (yes, this thing runs on a laptop), and switched them. Since the previous disk already had Artix in it, I said “Well, what if I put something else in there?” and went for Chimera Linux, as it was already in one of the mentioned USB sticks.

Reality / “Awful, as always!”

I haven't mentioned this, but I first tried installing Chimera on my drive a few days after the “Linux Distros” page: I installed it with two major changes that the previous Artix install did not have: LUKS encryption, LVM, and the Limine boot loader.

Before I go further, I should link towards [okko], who helped me go through the Limine configuration and also explained to me how LVM worked (by that I mean showing me the vgchange -ay call).

The installation went great. Everything worked, nothing to tear my hair about: however, something didn't feel right, so I went back to Artix Linux, with the sole modification of the forementioned major changes done.

Another Idea / “Too many of these often lead to a slow and painful death.”

Basically, after a considerable amount of time, I realized: “Linux is not that hard. It simply is a few binaries alongside an init system.”

The thought, like it or not, is true, so, naturally, I decided to think of making my own distribution, or, alternatively, Install Gentoo. I was going to go with Gentoo, but the conjuction of the two features I chose as the stage three tarball were supposedly in testing (musl libc and LLVM): it worried me, alongside the matter of having to compile the kernel itself (a previous attempt had crashed my computer), so I stepped back.

I previously had played around with ROOTFS tarballs, specially after reading a post on someone using them alongside bwrap(1) as a podman(1) replacement, so I recognized Gentoo's third stage archives as such. This lead me to believe that, if for whatever reason, I could most likely install something like Chimera via just chrooting to a disk with a ROOTFS extracted to it: and, it is true! You simply need to install whatever is needed for operation, otherwise you will find yourself with no boot device.

The Process / “Painful!”

So, the first time, it actually went sort of great! It booted somewhat well (I had to manually tell where the EFI file was, since I was also trying out UEFI in my system for the very first time and also due to Limine not creating the entry automatically), but I eventually got it running. I could boot into it, but I could not log in or something similar. I do not recall.

Second attempt goes similarly. Everything goes well, but the iwd(8) init script would not work. I did not attempt to run what the init script did, since I was already quite angry at how things were going, added the previous attempt.

Third and final attempt: same as the others. Everything goes well, but for some reason the init process just holds. It boots, but to some extent. I pick up the USB stick and disable the init scripts that it holds on, but then it just does not do anything: I give up once again.

I lost where I was going with this.