Slowly making progress on an x86 Chimera build… `base-cbuild` completed.
Pictured is only a chroot on Alpine. More packages need to be built before it can boot itself.
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Chimera Linux: A Fresh Take on Lightweight Distros
https://techrefreshing.com/chimera-linux-lightweight-distro/
#ChimeraLinux #LightweightLinux
#LinuxDistro #NonGNU #FreeBSD
#Dinit #LinuxInstall #RaspberryPiLinux
#Wayland #Linux2025 #TechMinimalism
#LightweightLinuxdistros
Weekly GNU-like #MobileLinux Update (12/2025): GNOME 48 and other goodies
LINux on MOBileWeekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (16/2025): Counting Easter EggsFuriOS update 13.0.9 adds Pipewire camera support (and other things), GNOME Clocks gains boottime alarms that work while suspended, Nemo Mobile demonstrates device locking on video, Sailfish OS Community News and a Ubuntu Touch Q&A, and way, way more. Enjoy!
BREAKING NEWS: Chimera Linux bravely announces that it's *not* doing something! 
In a stunning plot twist, they won't drop #RISC-V support, because, you know, someone lent them a spare computer. 
Stay tuned for more thrilling updates on how to do absolutely nothing! 
https://chimera-linux.org/news/2025/03/new-riscv-server.html #ChimeraLinux #News #TechUpdates #FunnyMoments #HackerNews #ngated
Chimera Linux · Not dropping RISC-V support after all (maybe)As circumstances have changed, we are not dropping RISC-V repos for the time being. Instead, newly rebuilt repositories are introduced, built on hardware, with tests. This support is provisional for now, with the new builder still being evaluated to see how it holds up in the long term.
#Linux Weekly Roundup for March 16th, 2025: #Debian 12.10, #KDE Plasma 6.3.3, #Garuda #COSMIC preview, #DXVK 2.6, #Ubuntu to adopt #Rust-based GNU Coreutils, #GStreamer 1.26, KDE Frameworks 6.12, #ChimeraLinux drops #RISCV support, #Audacity 3.7.2, #digiKam 8.6, #LXQt 2.2 features, #Mesa 25.1 defaulting to NVK, #Bodhi Linux 8 to ship with new theme, and more https://9to5linux.com/9to5linux-weekly-roundup-march-16th-2025
Dropping RISC-V support
｢ Overall, it seems the whole RISC-V industry/market seems to be overly busy with advertising how they perform in AI to release something that is actually worthwhile as a build machine. I have waited patiently, but my patience has run out and I can no longer keep this up ｣
Chimera Linux · Dropping RISC-V supportThe next set of images will drop RISC-V support. The builder is currently still going but within the next few days it will stop, and the repositories will stay in place but frozen. Nothing will change in packaging (the build profile will remain, template support where present will remain, cross-toolchains will remain) but there will be no more updates to the repo for the foreseeable future.
Note to @chimera_linux : the 'History' page of the official docs needs to be updated with news about entering the beta phase in December. A significant milestone to be proud of!
https://chimera-linux.org/docs/history
I'm going to give Chimera another look this week. 
Chimera LinuxHistoryChimera Linux
Suite du changement d'OS :
Je sais pas vous, mais moi je sens bien, chez moi. Je commence à me faire à Chimera Linux. Quand on est habitué à Debian et sa doc monolithique pour tous les outils de base, il faut juste se faire à l'idée de chercher la doc à différents endroits : Chimera, Artix, FreeBSD, etc. Et finalement, tout est bien plus simple, une fois l'adaptation passée.
(Remarque : j'ai un fond d'écran plus apaisé dans les autres espaces, trop de rouge ici)
Thanks to @chimera_linux for putting together all the best tools from the floss world 
I was prepared to much harder work to get it work, giving that it is only in beta since December! #ChimeraLinux #chimeralinux
New post: https://www.wezm.net/v2/posts/2024/tiny-cdn/
I built a tiny CDN for my website to reduce the latency for visitors in different parts of the world.
https://linkedlist.org/ is now hosted on #ChimeraLinux using a mini-CDN/Edge network I built. I have a servers in Australia, France, and USA with GeoDNS selecting which one to send you to.
Is this needlessly complicated for such a low-traffic website? Yes, but I wanted to try to make it faster for more people and here we are. I already had the AU server and the other two cost just over $US1/month, so it shouldn't send me broke… hopefully.
linkedlist.orgLinked ListTech links from around the internet by Wesley Moore.
okay so i've bootstrapped and tested #ghc in #chimeralinux , most of the test suite is passing. will put up a repo later, it's better than alpine for compiling statically linked #haskell executables
Replied in thread
@osnews PSA from an owner of a custom Ampere Altra workstation: gpu/graphics choice is limited and affects OS choice! There is a reason System76 chose a NVidia gpu.
The Ampere Altra has a PCIe bug that causes problems with AMD gpus and the linux amdgpu driver, requiring an out-of-tree linux kernel patch that is sporadically maintained and unlikely to ever be upstreamed. (chimera-linux.org is the only distro that ships with this patch applied) The amdgpu drm driver maintainers have expressed no interest in working around this bug within the driver itself either.
Remember that this driver ends up in FreeBSD and OpenBSD too! Personally a Polaris generation gpu has worked with stock OpenBSD 7.6 kernel because the kernel handles device memory mapping differently than linux and doesn’t seem trigger the PCIe bug. With a newer Navi 2nd gen gpu, the bug interrupts firmware loading in stock OpenBSD. It can be worked around, but:
There is also an issue where Vega and newer gpus require cpu hardware floating point math in the kernel driver code which wasn’t supported on arm64 until drm in Linux 6.2. The most recent releases of FreeBSD and OpenBSD are either on an older drm than that, or haven’t ported the hardware floating point code within the kernel driver on arm64 yet. So even if you get the Navi firmware to load, you don’t get any farther than that (Display Core requires the fpu code).
Nvidia supports arm64 with their closed source driver and is unaffected the PCIe bug (or works around it, depending on what you read, but the code is secret so 
) but no BSD for you! They only have Linux arm64 drivers. The older cards supported by nouveau will also get you nowhere on BSD.
Also note that Nvidia DOES NOT ship an arm64 option rom GOP driver for EFI console graphics on any of their cards. Your motherboard/platform could provide an emulator in the UEFI firmware to use the x86-64 GOP driver (my Asrock motherboard doesn’t.) Polaris AMD gpus didn’t include arm64 GOP in the rom, but the 2nd gen Navi DOES. So you can get boot console on it but only working OS graphics on patched linux 
I've never used GNOME desktop for more than a day. With my new Chimera install, its the primary desktop environment and I'm going to give it a fair shake for a week and see if its a keeper!
Thanks to @wezm for putting this intriguing distro back on my radar!
www.wezm.netWhy Chimera LinuxI received a reply to my Tech Stack 2024
post asking: Why Chimera Linux? I wrote a response that turned out longer than
anticipated and figured I may as well post it here too. I’m not trying to
convince you to use Chimera with this post, just note down why it appeals to
me. That’s really the crux of it: there’s dozens of distros out there all with
different goals and values and Chimera really speaks to me, for you it might be
something else.
There were a few defaults on Chimera Linux that commonly tripped up build tooling such as make being bmake, install being BSD install, and some other flags to tools like cp and ln. q66 has been on a quest lately to address these. Default make was switched to GNU make, install gained a GNU compatible mode, and other tools got compatibility arguments. The end result is far fewer patches required to build things. For example:
• https://github.com/chimera-linux/cports/compare/1d0eedfa3704...f220481a81b4
• https://github.com/chimera-linux/cports/commit/de85b12a98b26219eca966e56eaec336e81d2a7b
GitHubComparing a40feaf75b9c...b0dd53277ee4 · chimera-linux/cportsChimera ports collection. Contribute to chimera-linux/cports development by creating an account on GitHub.
I'm hosting an Australian mirror of repo.chimeralinux.org. This speeds up downloads for folks in this part of the world, especially package updates. I think it may also be beneficial for folks in parts of Asia too.
The mirror is hosted on a server running Chimera Linux. I've written a post describing how to use it and a bit of background of how I set it up:
https://www.wezm.net/v2/posts/2024/australian-chimera-linux-mirror/
www.wezm.netAustralian Chimera Linux MirrorI have set up a mirror of
repo.chimeralinux.org on a server in
Australia (Brisbane). It’s been running well for a couple of weeks now. The
root of the mirror shows an index of what is hosted and when it was
last synced. /chimera is where the Chimera data lives.
It mirrors the packages as well as ISO and rootfs downloads. Using the mirror
greatly speeds up package downloads, which in-turn makes things like apk upgrade a lot faster. Some rudimentary testing suggests this this server may
also provide a speed improvement for folks in parts of Asia too.
Hi thought I'd better introduce myself. I'm Justine I'm a marine electronics engineer to trade which basically means I install / repair anything on a vessel from satellite internet and sat TV to autopilots, radars, VHFs and navigational equipment. Other than that I've been a #Linux user since around 2000 and even worked on the distro LRs Linux that basically compiled from scratch according to the users hardware and was LFS based. My current daily driver is #ChimeraLinux and my WM of choice is #RiverWm
I am currently migrating my #homelab from #Ubuntu to #FreeBSD.
I made some progress on booting Chimera Linux on the Yoga 7x tonight. I created a package from Qualcomm’s kernel tree, added a package with some firmware from Windows, and built an ISO with the dtb accessible to grub.
Told grub to boot using the 7x dtb file, which got past the immediate reboot after choosing an entry but clearly some things I still need to work out.
New post: Why Chimera Linux
I received a reply to my Tech Stack 2024 post asking: Why Chimera Linux? I wrote a response that turned out longer than anticipated and figured I may as well post it to my website too. I’m not trying to convince people to use Chimera with this post, just note down why it appeals to me.
www.wezm.netWhy Chimera LinuxI received a reply to my Tech Stack 2024
post asking: Why Chimera Linux? I wrote a response that turned out longer than
anticipated and figured I may as well post it here too. I’m not trying to
convince you to use Chimera with this post, just note down why it appeals to
me. That’s really the crux of it: there’s dozens of distros out there all with
different goals and values and Chimera really speaks to me, for you it might be
something else.