I had Devuan running without a display manager using autologin with this in ~/.profile to start the desktop automatically on login to TTY1:

[ $(tty) = /dev/tty1 ] && exec startx

The advantage of this method is that X is rootless.

I don't use session management so I have no idea how that side of things works without a DM though.

Lol.

Yes, source-based distributions are certainly an aquired taste but the customisation possibilities are interesting, especially with KISS' language-agnostic packaging system.

I'm tempted to build apk-tools and use that to install large binary packages like FF and possibly the kernel. Or perhaps fork the repositories and try to get GitHub's CI/CD to build them for me.

Anyway, the system itself is gorgeous. Very elegant.

OK, been trying it out a bit more. No X yet because it takes so long to compile stuff.

The init system is busybox with it's version of sv providing the service management. The rest of the userland is also provided by the various busybox utilities, including the shell.

It is incredibly minimalist, even more so than Alpine Linux. Here's the ps_mem & pstree output from a bare console login:

 Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used       Program

 24.0 KiB +  47.5 KiB =  71.5 KiB       init
516.0 KiB + 182.5 KiB = 698.5 KiB       udevd
216.0 KiB + 572.0 KiB = 788.0 KiB       busybox (8)
---------------------------------
                          1.5 MiB
=================================

init-+-5*[getty]
     |-runsvdir
     |-sh---sh---pstree
     `-udevd

Nice :-)

I've just got it installed tonight, the kernel is compiled and the bootloader configured. I'll try to boot it and install X tomorrow.

Watch this space :-)

EDIT: so far it is *beautiful* to work with.

The pattern is improving though: 14 results for beowulf and just 7 for ceres.

And please check the package descriptions: most of that stuff is for interacting with systemd and so will do *nothing* if it isn't installed.

That's the default setting, see the comments in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades

Yes, I suppose.

It's likely to be caused by your DHCP server, as Geoff notes.

You might be able to prevent it by adding this to /etc/rc.local:

hostnamectl --transient set-hostname "$hostname"

Replace $hostname with the desired hostname.

But I don't know if hostnamectl(1) will work in (or is included with) Devuan. If it doesn't work then you can configure dhclient to not ask for a hostname:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/875276/ … ame-change

Moving to another provider is pretty simple and there's plenty of choice so they don't really "control" anything.

I host a few things on GitHub and I'm happy to let M$ pay the bill for serving it up.

Do you mean the Linux kernel?

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/

Yes but the NVIDIA blobs don't provide an fbdev driver and so cannot run a high resolution console screen.

No, but you do need to configure it: https://wiki.debian.org/UnattendedUpgrades

tl;dr:

# dpkg-reconfigure -plow unattended-upgrades

Do you have the kernel metapackage installed?

apt policy linux-image-686-pae

For a "root terminal" menu entry that does not need either gksu or polkit see the EDIT at the bottom of this post:

https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 34#p521734

^ That opens a terminal emulator under normal privileges and then runs sudo -i to attain a root shell without exposing the graphical interface.