If you have an android phone, you can plug it in via USB and enable USB Internet tethering, which will give you working internet access on your machine to do the Wi-Fi debugging with.
Try installing Gentoo. Follow their installation instructions. I was able to install it, but failed to install a DE. So, got a console going and couldn’t go further. That was about 2 years ago. I have an extra laptop that I always install stuff on to learn.
Fun fact, the init process can be anything, even /bin/bash or a shell script. But if it ends or dies so does the system, and of course you want extra features like multiuser capability, better interface etc. So it’s typically a more complex system like you said, that starts a bunch of other things. But you can still see the init process with PID 1 there in the process list. 😊
You pretty much got it, except for the fifth point.
A desktop environment (“DE”) is separate from the compositor (X11 or Wayland), but can’t exist without it.
At the end of the day, a DE is really just a “window manager” with a bunch of bundled applications, like taskbars/panels, a file manager, an app menu, etc. It’s as minimal or as feature rich as you want it to be.
The window manager dictates what to draw on the screen and where, but the compositor is what actually does the work. One is kind of useless without the other.
Hopefully that makes sense, I’m not a rocket surgeon.
A using a spare desktop as a headless VM server would be a good way to practice your CLI skills. Don’t install a GUI, or web admin tool, and only use SSH to admin it.
From there, setup a couple of VMs for Arch or Gentoo testing. Eventually, a Linux From Scratch attempt would provide a lot of learning opportunities.
The major parts of any distro are just bootloader, kernel, init, shell, and package system. The filesystem isn’t “part” of the distro, it’s just an abstraction layer to work with data on the drive, and should be considered independent of the packaged distribution itself.
With the above, you can run the basics of Linux on a device. The DE is not needed, and included packages and libraries are at the discretion of the maintainers. The included choices of all the above is the only thing that differentiates each distro.
If it helps in your understanding at all, back in the day, in order to install something like Slackware, you had to build each layer of these things manually like so: format and partition disk from disk in DOS, copy bootloader to newly partitioned HDD, boot to single user mode, compile kernel, add entries to bootloader, reboot from disk to Linux kernel, open TTY, set user and shell, reboot again, compile DE, set init level and basic services, reboot to DE, and then you had a Desktop.
If I understand correctly, the filesystem driver is contained within the kernel for all linux-native filesystems (Ext4, XFS, BtrFS, F2FS, etc.), just as drivers for computer components and devices are. But drivers to access NTFS (Windows) and HFS+ (Mac OS) drives are programs in userspace
Systemd has gone way and beyond what was supposed to be a replacement for init.rc.
Most important thing… not ALL Linux distros include systemd as the default init system. That’s the beauty of Linux (and POSIX in general), you can choose.
It seems like what you’re asking about are more what I’d think of as components of an a Linux “system” or “install.”
First off, it’s definitely worth saying that there aren’t a lot of rules that would apply to “all” Linux systems. Linux is huge in embedded systems, for instance, and it’s not terribly uncommon to find embedded Linux systems with no shells, no DE/WM, and no package manager. (I’m not 100% sure a filesystem is technically necessary. If it is, you can probably get away with something that’s… kinda sorta a filesystem. But I’ll get to that.)
Also, it’s very common to find “headless” systems without any graphical system whatsoever. Just text-mode. These are usually either servers that are intended to be interacted with over a network or embedded systems without screens. But there are a lot of them in the wild.
There’s also Linux From Scratch. You can decide for yourself whether it qualifies as a “distribution”, but it’s a way of running Linux on (typically) a PC (including things like DE’s) without a package manager.
All that I’d say are truly necessary for all Linux systems are 1) a bootloader, 2) a Linux kernel, 3) A PID 1 process which may or may not be an init system. (The “PID 1 process” is just the first process that is run by the Linux kernel after the kernel starts.)
The “bunch of default applications and daemons” feels like three or four different items to me:
Systemd is an example of an “init system.” There are several available. OpenRC, Runit, etc. It’s main job is to manage/supervise the daemons. Ensure they’re running when they’re supposed to be. (I’ll mention quickly here that Systemd has a lot more functionality built in than just for managing daemons and gets a bad rap for it. Network configuration, cron, dbus for communication between processes, etc. But it still probably qualifies as “an init system.” Just not just an init system.)
Daemons are programs that kindof run in the background and handle various things.
Coreutils are probably something I’d list separately from user applications. Coreutils are mostly for interacting with low-ish level things. Formatting filesystems. Basic shell commands. Things like that.
User applications are the programs that you run on demand and interact with. Terminal emulators, browsers compilers, things like that. (I’ll admit the line between coreutils and user applications might be a little fuzzy.)
As for your question about graphical systems, X11 and Wayland work a little differently. X11 is a graphical system that technically can be run without a desktop environment or window manager, but it’s pretty limited without one. The DE/WM runs as one or more separate processes communicating with X11 to add functionality like a taskbar, window decorations, the ability to have two or more separate windows and move them around and switch between them, etc. A Wayland “compositor” is generally the same process handling everything X11 would handle plus everything the DE/WM would handle. (Except for the Weston compositor that uses different “shells” for DE/WM kind of functionality.)
As far as things that might be missing from your list, I’ll mention the initrd/initramfs. Typically, the way things are done, when the Linux kernel is first loaded by the bootloader, it an “initial ramdisk” is also loaded. Basically, it creates a filesystem that lives only in ram and populates it from an archive file called an “initramfs”. (“initrd” is the older way to do the same thing.) Sometimes the initramfs is bundled into the same file as the kernel itself. But, that initial ramdisk provides an initial set of tools necessary to load the “main” root filesystem. The initramfs can also do some cool things like handling full disk encryption.
So, the whole list of typical components for a PC-installed Linux system to be interacted with directly as I’d personally construct it would be something like:
Bootloader
Linux Kernel
Initramfs
Filesystem(s)
Shell(s)
Init system
Daemons
Coreutils
Graphical system (X11 or Wayland potentially with a DE/WM.)
User applications
Package manager
But techinically, you could have a functional, working “Linux system” with just:
Bootloader
Linux Kernel
Either a nonvolatile filesystem or initrd/initramfs (and I’m not 100% sure this one is even strictly necessary)
A PID 1 process
Hopefully this all helps and answers your questions! Never stop learning. :D
You would need some non volatile storage to hold your bootloader be that on the network or local. Also any shell more complicated than tty will need to store config files to run.
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