Thanks for the tips, will do as suggested!

cheers

Mixing distros/repos, even those based on Debian, can really screw up a Debian/Devuan install and create a Frankende**an.

Backup your data, do a clean install and import your files.

Its not as easy as it seems to migrate from Ubuntu 14.04 to Devuan Jessie.

I followed these steps and got stuck at the step:

root@devuan:~# apt-get install xfce4

when the libstdc++6 and gcc version was stuck on Ubuntu and wouldn't upgrade.

Depends: libstdc++6 (>= 4.9) but 4.8.4-2ubuntu1~14.04.3 is to be installed

So I mounted the install CD, updated sources with apt-cdrom, located the libstdc++6 debs and used dpkg to force the upgrade.

 sudo dpkg --force-depends -r gcc:amd64 gcc-4.8:amd64 gcc-4.8-base:amd64 gcc-4.9-base:i386 lib32gcc1:amd64 libgcc-4.8-dev libgcc1:i386

Did a few cycles of

# apt-get -f install

and

# apt-get dist-upgrade

to clear the errors and was able to install xfce4 and slim.
However, wasn't able to start X and while system booted, was very unusable.
Using apt-show-versions was able to locate 186 debs from Ubuntu which were still in the system.

$ apt-show-versions | grep ubuntu | wc -l 

So used Knoppix to restore from backup.
I'll have another go over the next few days with a different approach.

Maybe some extra steps are required to allow this to go smoothly?

Your advice is appreciated!

This guide will take you through what is required to upgrade to Devuan. Many of you may be familiar with this already, the only changes here are formatting changes to make it more suitable for posting here.

So, where can the original document be found? I'm asking this, so I can link to it on the Howto page of the Devuan documentation outline I've put together at http://wiki.friendsofdevuan.org/doku.ph … n_doc:root.

This should be updated (as well as the list of supported architectures?).

This implies sudo being installed which will not necessarily be the case (I don't have it.). I assume, sudo -s is equivalent to su anyway, so it's probably better to use that.

++ UPDATE ++

golinux pointed me to the source on gitlab. I've now copied that into the wiki and begun to make adjustments: http://wiki.friendsofdevuan.org/doku.ph … rom_debian

Migrate to Devuan Jessie

This document describes how to migrate to Devuan Jessie from Debian.

Performing the migration

We need to edit the mirrors list so we can set the Devuan repository as the source for packages.

root@debian:~# editor /etc/apt/sources.list

Change your mirrors to the Devuan mirror, commenting out the previous Debian mirrors.

deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged jessie main
deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged jessie-updates main
deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged jessie-security main
deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged jessie-backports main

Before we can fetch packages from the Devuan repository we need to update the package index files.

root@debian:~# apt-get update

The Devuan keyring is required to authenticate packages.

root@debian:~# apt-get install devuan-keyring --allow-unauthenticated

Now that the Devuan keyring is installed you should update the indexes again so that packages are authenticated from now on.

root@debian:~# apt-get update

We can now migrate to Devuan. Choose slim as the default display manager if prompted.

root@debian:~# apt-get dist-upgrade

In order to remove systemd as pid1 a one time reboot is required.

root@devuan:~# reboot

Post migration tasks

If you were using GNOME under Debian before migration I recommend changing the session manager to startxfce4.

root@devuan:~# update-alternatives --config x-session-manager

systemd components should now be removed from the system.

root@devuan:~# apt-get purge systemd systemd-shim

If you are not using D-Bus you might be able to remove libsystemd0.

root@devuan:~# apt-get purge libsystemd0

Purge any orphaned packages left over from your previous Debian install.

root@devuan:~# apt-get autoremove --purge

This is a good time to clean out old package archives left over from your Debian system.

root@devuan:~# apt-get autoclean

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