Published update of distribution builds Chimera Linux, notable use of the Linux kernel combined with utilities from FreeBSD, the system manager dinit and the standard C library Musl. The assembly is carried out by the Clang compiler. Bootable Live images generated for x86_64, ppc64le, aarch64, riscv64 and ppc64 architectures in versions with GNOME (1.8 GB), KDE (2.5 GB) and a stripped-down environment (1 GB).
The project is aimed at creating a Linux distribution with alternative tools and is being developed taking into account the experience of developing Void Linux (the author of Chimera is a former Void maintainer, responsible for POWER and PowerPC architectures). Like Void Linux, the project is developed using a continuous cycle of updating program versions (rolling model). FreeBSD custom components are chosen to be less complex and more suitable for lightweight and compact systems than the standard GNU toolkit.
In addition to the FreeBSD utilities supplied in place of packages such as coreutils, findutils, diffutils, sed and grep, the distribution includes GNU Make, util-linux, syslog-ng, udev, pam, dinit, clang, lld, libc++ and musl. Memory allocation functions in musl have been replaced by mimalloc. ZFS is used as the file system. The /var partition does not retain its state between restarts (stateless). PipeWire is used to control multimedia streams. In graphical environments, Wayland is used by default.
To install additional programs, both binary packages and our own source build system – cports, written in Python are offered. Currently maintained over 4000 ports. The build environment runs in a separate, unprivileged container created using the bubblewrap toolkit. To manage binary packages, the APK package manager (Alpine Package Keeper, apk-tools) is used, and Flatpak can be used as an option.
In the new release:
- Added an experimental console installer launched by the command chimera-installer