Which is why I fired an email towards the Gentoo PR people so we can get an "official response" from Gentoo directly. The email has yet to be answered, but given that it's only 2 days and weekend to boot (s'cuse the (bad) pun ) I'm not too bothered about that, for now.

I've contacted the Gentoo PR people about this to get some official statement from them. (no idea who this steve fellow is btw, do enlighten me if you can )

Yup. And reading through the options it's clear that whomever wrote them is obviously intent on getting Debian into the systemd-exclusivity-zone ASAP. Yes, the default option is "more discussion" but only to wear out any pro-init-choice supporters until they give up their resistance or leave the Debian project. Note that the clarification of option 6, which makes it mandatory for Debian dev's to support multiple init-systems, is very, very short indeed, especially in light of the others which favour systemd.

But that's just my interpretation

Isn't this implied by the freedom of choice?

OK, I shall try traceroute if I get round to it on a next update round, whenever I get time for that (long story)

Open a terminal and do the following, in this order:

sudo su
<enter your password as asked, confirm with enter, likewise the subsequent commands>
apt-get install aptitude
nano /etc/apt/sources.list
<use the arrow keys to navigate, replace all instances you find of jessie to ascii, save the file with Ctrl+o, exit with Ctrl+x>
aptitude
<this invokes the program interactively>
Press the following keys: u, Shift+u, g, g
(yes, press g twice, make sure you give the program time to finish before pressing the next key!)
The program will now update your system, this will take a fair while
When asked, press q then enter to quit aptitude.
reboot

HTH!

The project webpage is here, even in German so you should be able to follow it

https://tabos.gitlab.io/project/rogerrouter/

Which links further to

https://gitlab.com/tabos

As I have no need for the services this program provides (who uses a fax these days!) I can't tell you anything about its functions.

Is your normal user part of the lpr group? I.e. can you connect to the device as root? If so, add your user to the lpr group.

As a quick (?) aside: on my work I have a HP3030 happily being shared across a LAN using CUPS. It's connected via USB to a server that also happens to be a printer server. In CUPS I made the printer available for sharing and it shows up on other machines that have the HP driver package installed, as well as CUPS.

Doesn't RHEL7 come with sysVinit as optional/alternative to systemd? If so, there's your answer   Alternatively, building OpenRC might be an option if you deploy the OS on multiple instances of said (embedded) system.

On systems where booting from NVMe disk isn't possible, for whatever reason, I'd suggest using the NVMe disk as a cache instead. The system is installed on a 'standard' SSD while the NVMe disk is configured as cache for this SSD. Use the bcache tool from the repo's. And here's the manual: click!

This setup allows the sys-admin to choose any boot configuration and still have the benefits of fast access from the NVMe disk.

HTH!

If you manually download the package from the link provided, does that work for you? If you can, you can install it with dpkg.

Alternatively, what's the output of the commands

uname -a
dpkg --get-selections | grep linux-image

The user "www-data" is the Apache user, so only applies if you're deploying Apache as your web-server. As for multi-user systems, every Linux system is by default a multi-user system, but most human users will never know, nor have the need to

As for the user-permissions issue mentioned by the OP, there's a fairly simple solution: use a live-cd from your distro (I assume Devuan in this case). Boot your system into the live-cd modus and start a terminal. Then, assuming your entire system is on one SATA disk in a single partition (sda1):

mkdir /tmp/devuan-rescue
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/devuan-rescue
cd /tmp/devuan-rescue
chown -R root:root ./*

This creates a temp. directory, then mounts the entire system in that and changes the ownership of all files to root as part of the group root. That should allow you to log back in (as root, obviously) into the system and restore file permissions from there. See also

man chown

This'll list you the various options and correct syntax of the command.