All good!

PS. I'm glad to avoid Ubuntu 20.04 too. There's no debate about systemd, almost no debate about snap and so on. There's only concern about icons, themes and superficial stuff with the release of 20.04.

@swanson . . . You might also want to have a look at the documentation on the beta website in case you have need to do a similar migration.

Yes, I saw that first and tried to follow it but got stuck on installing the devuan keyring. It was not until this thread suggested to download the keyring as a deb-file and then installing it, that I could continue. So I followed this thread instead.

It's gone quite ok and I've migrated some more packages now. Still some to go but the remaining packages seem non-essential for booting and logging in. So long as you can boot and log in to a console most things can be fixed. But I log in to Beowulf Xfce 4.12 right now, so it's ok. A good feeling!

Some of the hitches were with Elogind, which wouldn't configure during install but after uninstalling systemd it went ok. And a couple of others like avahi.

I couldn't have done it wihtout this thread and the app aptitude. So far I've just done aptitude safe-upgrade since aptitude full-upgrade had way too many conflicts. And I've also just enabled the repo beowulf main yet. But I will continue....

So you can migrate from Ubuntu to Devuan too!

* So far so good.

inxi -Fr
System:  Kernel: 4.19.0-8-amd64 x86_64 bits: 64 Desktop: Xfce 4.12.4 Distro: Devuan GNU/Linux 3 (beowulf) 
Machine:   Type: Desktop System: Hewlett-Packard product: HP Compaq 6005 Pro SFF PC v:
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 28.0 C mobo: N/A 
           Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A 
Repos:     Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list 
           1: deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf main contrib non-free
           2: deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf-updates main contrib non-free
           3: deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf-security main contrib non-free
           4: deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf-backports main contrib non-free

Cheers!

It took a very similar set of steps to migrate a WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) Debian 10 install over to Beowulf. As I recall the other necessary step was to change a link to init to point at sysv's init, rather than the 'special' version that I think came with WSL. Amazingly, more or less everything else worked right away after the upgrade.

Rehabilitating WSL is a decidedly niche interest, but it's great for those of us who like a 'proper' shell and all the Linux goodies on a work-mandated Windows machine.

What I've done in the past was to install sysvinit-core and reboot in debian before switching to devuan.

fsr (Still waiting to hear of someone migrating a devuan install to debian.)

It looks like you were able to do an upgrade in devuan while running systemd.

Actually, you may be are correct.  I did not notice that.  I think you are referring to the first "apt upgrade", yes that was while using systemd.  I thought that would only pull in the stuff that was not requiring systemd.  In total, there were only 10 or 12 packages pulled in.  I just had to find a good step by step so that apt could do it right.

fsr > In case you are interested, I will email you the note that I made of the steps and terminal output.  I finally got it to work one time and I did it again, step by step, to make sure that the steps were correct. 

I really was not expecting it to work at all.  Before this test, I also did a stretch to ascii migration and it was much easier.

1+

Thanks for testing and for the nice write-up. It looks pretty easy. I've tried a few upgrades from ascii to beowulf, and those were easy.

This was done in virtualbox.  I installed the debian buster "testing" iso file (with firmwares) located at:
https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unof … 64/iso-cd/
I then connected to this VM through ssh so that I could copy from and paste into a terminal window.  This was easier than using the vm window.
From this debian install, I made only the following changes:
- installed net-tools, to display ip address

- export PATH to /root/.bashrc by adding:

I then started the migration to devuan:
- changed sources.list to devuan, left only the one beowulf main entry
- installed devuan-keyring with

- then ran these commands:

-altered /etc/network/interfaces file
change these two lines from,

-to-

-then updated grub to change Debian to Devuan

- purge systemd with

to see that all is well.

Finally, the command

produces no output.  No systemd here!! 

I distinctly remember reading three or four years ago that the ability to migrate from a debian to devuan install may not be possible in the future.  I don't think that day is here, yet.