Bluefin is Awesome, critical questions though

Bluefin and Aurora
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I have installed Blulefin on two Framework laptops at this point. I fully understand why Bluefin´s approach with an immutable Linunx system is so important. I really really dig it. However, there are two issues, which I have already posted about on this forum that are holding me back from making Bluefin my permanent new home.

Things that needs to have access to kernel are just not possible on Bluefin. Or at least I have not yet found a way to accomplish this. This leads me to ask about how this issue was thought about when putting Bluefin together?

Virtualization requires this as well as a host of other pieces of software. Are these things just not intended to have working on Bluefin, and that is just the cost of business for this immutability?

This is not a whine or anything likek that. I just want to be clear of this question before I continue down a rabbit hole that is going to dead end.

I really appreciate ALL of the work that has gone into Bluefin!

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What do you mean specifically by “access to the kernel?” What task are you trying to accomplish?

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First off, you sir, are awesome. Thank you!

As to your question, I’m trying to do the things I am asking about here:

Despite my best efforts with using distrobox, etc. I just cannot get vmnet and vmon installed for Workstation. I can’t get Crossover to fully work either. I was able to get Resilio Sync working through a Fedora distrobox though.

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Oh, not sure on the vmware kernel modules, I think we’d have to build those? This is probably something that’s out of scope for us though. No clue on crossover.

For resilio sync I’d just use this container.
https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/resilio-sync

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I can respect that my use case is possibly outside of the scope of immutable, but just wanted to confirm that this is the case.

Thank you again!

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to be honest, its alot easier on nixos. no disrespect to the dev’s of bluefin

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What is easier on NixOS ?

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setting up anything related to kernel parameters/flags to vm sessions including the vm kernel flags

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Ah yes,

This is quite understandable given the Fedora Atomic (Silverblue) context

One other way would be to make a custom image based on Bluefin,
But at this point, if you’re comfortable with NixOS, I guess NixOS is better fit for that

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Yes, TBO its getting very close to switching back to nixos again as Im finding bluefin feeling very much like M$ meaning feeling extremely restrictive and painful to tweak

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If you are that much of a tweaker and you already know NixOS, maybe it would make more sense to use NixOS in your context

Also see

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Both bluefin-dx and aurora-dx have full libvirt support, the OPs original question was about vmware’s kernel modules, which we don’t support in Bluefin.

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Oh, thanks for the suggestion.

NixOS is just flawless on my Folio 9470M, updates and rebuild switches are lightning-fast!

By the way, was that sarcastic? I thought you wanted to know about Nix simplicity.

Anyway, have a great day, sir. Hope you warm up to potential users!

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Nope, I truly like declarative / NixOS concepts

When I say “that much of a tweaker” I mean “editing the kernel” kind of a tweaker; which I’m too noob to understand currently

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thanks 4 clarifying, i take that statement back

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This is cool; there are a few things I’m bringing to my flake. Thanks for sharing it!

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my please. glad to help. im actually having alot of fun with clr linux kernel (clear linux) and boy, its fast

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As far as I understand you can install VMware workstation in one of 3 ways. You can still use overlays like in silver blue with rpm-ostree, so if it can be installed as an rpm package you can do that and it’ll juslow your updates a bit because it needs to be relayered with every update. Or if it’s something like a shell script as I seem to recall, or installer, you could install it in a container image you build as a pipeline fork of bluefin and essentially build your own os image. Maybe you could also install in distrobox.

None of this is documented of course except how to build your own os with a bluefin. But you may have better luck googling “ +vmware +silverblue “

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