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 (but couldn't due to all my USBs being 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 / “Not that awful this time around!”

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.

Also, this install was made following word for word the Chimera documentation: no weird ROOTFS install method or anything! Just something worth noting.

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 directory structure with some binaries!”

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): I got doubtful and decided to step back.

I previously had played around with ROOTFS tarballs, especially 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 nowhere to boot from.

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 Limine didn't add the boot entry automatically), but I eventually got it running. I could boot into it, but I could not log in or something similar: I can't 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.