Adventures with Chimera Linux

2025-03-29 21:38

This article documents my experience installing Chimera Linux on a decade-old MacBook Air.

Why Chimera Linux? While I’ve used many Linux distributions over the years, most carry significant historical baggage. I wanted to see what a more modern distribution could achieve. Chimera Linux’s technical approach is quite appealing—it doesn’t use systemd and incorporates userland components from FreeBSD.

The initial setup went surprisingly smoothly. I downloaded the image(x86-64, plasma), flashed it to a USB drive, and booted the MacBook Air from it—all in one go, which felt almost too good to be true. Upon closer inspection, however, I discovered that the hard drive hadn’t loaded properly. Additionally, while Bluetooth worked, the wireless network card wasn’t recognized. Not a perfect start, but still acceptable—certainly smoother than my previous adventures with FreeBSD.

I began by addressing the hard drive problem. After researching the error, I found that it was related to a kernel parameter. The solution was to add intel_iommu=off to the kernel boot parameters. Nothing too complex—just a matter of rebooting and remembering to modify the GRUB settings before each boot, otherwise the hard drive wouldn’t be recognized. The proper way to make this change permanent would be editing /etc/default/grub, but this approach doesn’t work on a LiveCD.

Next came the more challenging wireless network card issue. The symptom was a lack of device files in /dev/net. Using lspci, I identified the card as a BCM4360. The default b43 and bcma modules loaded in the LiveCD couldn’t drive this card. After finding some documentation, specifically this one, I realized I needed to compile a kernel module. I initially wanted to compile it in the LiveCD environment to minimize unknowns, but since kernel version in the apk repository is newer than the LiveCD version, I decided to install the system first and then tackle the driver issue.

Following the official documentation, I created the necessary partitions (ZFS+EFI+boot), mounted them, and executed chimera-bootstrap -l /media/root to copy the LiveCD contents to the new partition. This step produced an error at the end—something about being unable to create hard links across devices. I suspected the script/command hadn’t handled this edge case properly, so I ignored it. When I ran apk upgrade --available, the process was painfully slow because the network connection was going through my phone’s hotspot via Bluetooth, resulting in limited bandwidth. After upgrading several packages, I simply hit Ctrl-C to interrupt the process. I then installed GRUB and rebooted without issues, but couldn’t get into X, and the Bluetooth service wasn’t running either. This presented a challenge since I had never dealt with fixing Bluetooth from the command line without network access, and even if I got Bluetooth working, I’d still need to connect to my phone to access the internet. I took the easy way out: rebooted, booted from the LiveCD again, mounted the ZFS partition, and fixed the issue. If I recall correctly, either sddm or sddm-dinit wasn’t installed; once installed, everything worked normally.

Of course, I still needed to compile the network card driver. I referenced this SlackBuild and modified this script slightly to get it to compile properly(gist here).

In reality, it wasn’t that straightforward. I first needed to install clang and gmake, then install/update linux-stable{,-dev}. The most frustrating part was discovering I also needed to install the wireless-regdb package. The original script was designed to use gcc for compilation, while Chimera Linux uses clang. Rather than hunting for environment variables, I simply created a symlink from clang to gcc, which worked fine for the compilation. After successful compilation, I had the wl.ko kernel module file and could load it with modprobe. Whether using modprobe -r or adding to the blacklist, I could drive the network card with my newly compiled wl.ko (visible in the PCI information), but /dev/net still showed only the tun device from my phone’s shared hotspot. As a last resort, I looked up the dmesg error (about loading regulatory.db) and discovered it was indeed due to a missing database. After installing the corresponding package with apk, everything worked properly.

My final thoughts:

I’ll continue to follow this distribution’s development. It shows potential, and the developer updates are quite frequent.