Introducing Casuarina Linux: A glibc-Based Chimera Linux Derivative - Casuarina Linux

Introducing Casuarina Linux: A glibc-Based Chimera Linux Derivative

by Wesley Moore

Casuarina Linux is an experimental, in-development Linux distribution derived from Chimera Linux.<br>It uses glibc instead of musl as libc. The motivation for this is to preserve much of the Chimera<br>experience while remaining binary compatible with the wider GNU/Linux ecosystem. The initial x86_64<br>ISO has been published, check out the download page to download it.

Casuarina is comprised of LLVM toolchain, Dinit init system, GNU libc, FreeBSD derived<br>core utilites, and apk package manager. The resulting system is compact and<br>efficient, but still full-featured and well suited to desktop use. It may appeal to people that want a<br>Linux distribution that’s up-to-date, doesn’t compromise on functionality, compatible, and easy to<br>understand and contribute to.

The system was bootstrapped from source using the same multi-stage process as Chimera. The use of<br>glibc complicates this because it currently requires gcc to build, so the bootstrap process<br>requires building GNU binutils, gcc, and then glibc. After that LLVM is built and all other<br>packages are built with LLVM. An implementation of libgcc is also provided by LLVM.

Packages are built with Chimera’s cbuild tool, which builds all packages in an isolated<br>sandbox. Package building is automated with Buildbot at build.casuarina.org. All<br>development takes place on Codeberg. Currently only x86_64 is supported. Eventually aarch64<br>should be supported too, but probably not any architectures beyond that. For other architectures<br>it’s better to use Chimera as there isn’t an established ecosystem of binaries to try to be<br>compatible with.

The distro is still considered in-development and experimental, but it is readily usable. I’ve been<br>daily driving it on my desktop and laptop for work and personal computing since mid-April.

If any of that sound interesting I hope you’ll try it out. Be sure to read the other pages on this<br>website too. There’s also forums for discussion at forum.casuarina.org.

Backstory

I’ve wanted a distro like this for a long time (my earliest experiments are from 2019). Chimera<br>Linux was exactly what I was looking for and I used it as the primary OS on my laptop from June<br>2023. However the reality of using a musl-based distribution on the desktop posed challenging for<br>me. It meant I never quite made the switch on my desktop, which I also use for my day job. Some of<br>the Musl incompatibilities required compromises or workarounds. Eventually I decided to see how hard<br>it would be to swap in glibc for musl and Casuarina is the result. See the about<br>page for more details.

Casuarina development began in June 2025, but things really got going in February 2026 after a<br>break in development. During that time the system was bootstrapped, the package set built, and<br>infrastructure set up. I’ve been using it as my daily driver for a while, and am now opening it<br>up to others, which I will admit is a bit daunting.