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 xfce image installations require more resources.

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://repo-default.voidlinux.org/live/current/. They can also be downloaded from other mirrors. Previous releases can be found under https://repo-default.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 sha256sum.txt file containing image checksums to verify the integrity of the downloaded images. Second is the sha256sum.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 sha256sum.txt file downloaded above. The following command will check the integrity of only the image(s) you have downloaded:

$ sha256sum -c --ignore-missing sha256sum.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 minisign 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 and package signatures. You will also need a copy of minisign(1); on Void, this is provided by the minisign package.

The minisign executable is usually provided by a package of the same name, and can also be installed on Windows, even without WSL or MinGW.

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 sha256sum.sig and sha256sum.txt files. First, you need to verify the authenticity of the sha256sum.txt file.

The following example demonstrates the verification of the sha256sum.txt file for the 20230628 images with minisign:

$ minisign -V -p /usr/share/void-release-keys/void-release-20230628.pub -x sha256sum.sig -m sha256sum.txt
Signature and comment signature verified
Trusted comment: This key is only valid for images with date 20230628.

Finally, you need to verify that the checksum for your image matches the one in the sha256sum.txt file. This can be done with the sha256(1) utility from the outils package, as demonstrated below for the 20230628 x86_64 base image:

$ sha256 -C sha256sum.txt void-live-x86_64-20230628-base.iso 
(SHA256) void-live-x86_64-20230628-base.iso: OK

Alternatively, if the sha256 utility isn't available to you, you can use sha256sum(1):

$ sha256sum -c sha256sum.txt --ignore-missing
void-live-x86_64-20230628-base.iso: OK

If neither program is available to you, you can compute the SHA256 hash of the file and compare it to the value contained in sha256sum.txt.

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.