Hello,

I am new to Devuan, but not to Debian (started pre-Sarge). I have been avoiding systemd through Debian Stretch, but I upgraded to Buster after the "systemd-shim" was removed. This caused LXDE to be removed because systemd was strictly prevented from being installed. The Devuan web page had instructions for migrating from Debian Stretch to ASCII. Since I was at Buster already I figured that migrating to Beowulf was appropriate even though there was no explicit recipe available.

I was successful at migrating from Debian Buster to Devuan Beowulf and then installed LXDE and everything is right with the world. Here is a synopsis of my process that I typed immediately after the task was completed.

Dan Griffin
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  Migration to Devuan Beowulf (testing) from Debian Buster.

Buster system is bare-bones using SysVinit and wicd. Not much else because I did the Stretch to Buster upgrade after "systemd-shim" was removed from Debian.

  The Devuan instructions start with Debian Jessie or Stretch to Devuan Ascii (stable) but I'm betting that I can do this trick. Please take a look at

  https://devuan.org/os/documentation/dev … e-to-ascii

for the process that I am basing this migration upon. The early steps for removing systemd were not necessary since it was already gone.

  First step, changing the sources.list file needs the entry
[trusted=yes] on the line

    deb [trusted=yes] http://deb.devuan.org/merged buster main contrib non-free

because my Buster version of apt-get would not create the proper data base without it.

  Then I could "apt-get install devuan-keyring" without errors.

  Also the "beowulf-security" doesn't yet exist (because it's "testing"?) so I commented it out from sources.list. Once the keyring was installed, I removed the "[trusted=yes]" from sources.list.

  Once the update is happy, then I did
apt-get upgrade
apt-get upgrade --with-new-pkgs
apt-get dist-upgrade

  Now for the big test. Reboot the system!

  Hooray, it does boot. And the X server comes up (/usr/lib/xorg/Xorg) along with lightdm. These two items were working before.

  Now to install my choice, LXDE,  which I couldn't do in Buster because of stupid dependencies that required all of systemd.

  Trying first "apt-get install lxde-core" and it doesn't go because of dependencies not scheduled for installation. I tracked this down to "policykit-1". So I installed "policykit-1" and then "apt-get install lxde-core" worked without requiring any systemd stuff.

  Now for another reboot to see what might be working.

  Lo and behold a miracle. The LXDE desktop appears, complete with my appropriate icons on the desktop and behavior settings. Firefox works, Thunderbird works, LXTerminal works, and I have yet to find a command line program that doesn't work. But then I haven't tried everything.

  Threw in an "update-initramfs" followed by "update-grub" for good measure. Probably not necessary, but shouldn't hurt.

  So now I am going to move data and stuff from my old laptop with a broken hinge and very slow processor onto this system and let it sit on the desk in my basement.

  Hopefully you will find my experience useful.

  Dan