I posted a while back that I was gonna set up a console based OS as a sort of project and to just learn some new things. I estimated I'd be putting an afternoon aside and be up and running with the help of some books and online resources. Thought it would be fun. Fast forward three weeks, holy shit. The process itself is straightforward, but when one thing doesn't want to cooperate, a thousand things that did go right count for nothing. The main things I came up against were firmware and networking issues.
I experimented with arch, alpine, ubuntu server and void. I finally settled on void. I went into this knowing nothing, so at one point i basically broke grub and turned my laptop into a paperweight, luckily I was able to reboot into a live environment and get back into my main OS, back everything up and basically start over. When I started this, I had no idea what EFI was or the difference between sda and sdb, so looking back I think I'd overfilled the EFI folder, and it had become a sort of graveyard of broken installations, making it impossible for grub to reach the kernel I needed.
The next issue I came up against wasn't really my fault, for some reason my firmware would identify a bootable disk, and then stop acknowledging its existence on reboot. Oh, and it decided to stop launching my keyboard, so I had no way of navigating BIOS settings. USB keyboard got around this. I need to use a USB keyboard if i want to boot a different partition or use BIOS settings. I have no idea why this happened and I'm not sure I can be bothered to fix it.
The final solution; two USB pens, one as a live boot and one as a target for installation. I used the void installer to install to the second USB pen, I then manually created a boot entry for it in grub rather than relying on my firmware to pick it up. And after three weeks of experimenting and destroying my laptop, I finally have a working console based OS. I now plan to sort of trace back everything I did and understand it.
I think the biggest thing I've learnt, beyond the installation process is how useful scripts are. I'm committing so much to memory, but for day to day stuff, knowing how to make scripts executable has made the OS actually start to feel usuable. I have ranger as a file manager and wordgrinder for writing.
How did you all learn this shit to the point it doesn't just break you. The idea anybody could have done this without assistance just seems arcane and mystical to me.