Hello, this is my first time here. Please forgive me for not knowing a thing or two.

I've been running Devuan for a few months now with much success. I've even managed to get it running without any problems on two of my laptops. But it's the first one, my desktop computer, that I ask about today. See, it's a conversion from Debian Sid to Devuan Ceres. Between my inexperience, and the many, many bodge fixes it's recieved that I have since forgotten about, it did not go exceptionally smoothly. But it worked, and I even got OpenRC working on it. Well, I say 'working' - two things are wrong with OpenRC on it.

First, every time it starts up, the logs are spammed with the same thing, over and over again.

/usr/lib/rc/sh/openrc-run.sh: 17: [: unexpected operator

This happens every single time it starts something up, sometimes multiple times, but only on my workstation. My X230T, which is a clean install, and my T470, which was a conversion job from Debian Sid just like the workstation, don't have these issues. Line 17 of the offending script, openrc-run.sh, is this:

if [ ! -e ${RC_SVCDIR}/softlevel ]; then

I can't tell what the problem is, but it apparently seems to be OK. I can't even get it to say what it's seeing in terms of $RC_SVCDIR by editing the shell script. However, I know it does something, because of the other problem I've been having with regards to user services.

Yes, OpenRC has user services now, and they've finally made it to Devuan. However, whenever I try to start up a process in user mode, like, say, pipewire, I get an error, one I've always seen in the openrc-run.sh whenever I try to figure out what RC_SVCDIR is:

 * You are attempting to run an openrc service on a
 * system which openrc did not boot.
 * You may be inside a chroot or you may have used
 * another initialization system to boot this system.
 * In this situation, you will get unpredictable results!
 * If you really want to do this, issue the following command:
 * touch /run/user/1000/openrc/softlevel
 * ERROR: pipewire failed to start

In this case, it seems, RC_SVCDIR is /run/user/1000/openrc, and OpenRC does not set things correctly. That's OK, this is a new thing, and I doubt Devuan's package managers have caught onto the problem. Checking other OpenRC-using distros, specifically Artix, they state that one of the prerequisites to running user processes is to have the PAM module properly loaded, which means placing the following lines in ./etc/pam.d/system-login:

# Do NOT change NOR split the below 2 lines:
session [default=1 success=ignore] pam_succeed_if.so uid >= 1000
-session optional pam_openrc.so

This is fine and dandy for Artix, but Devuan doesn't HAVE system-login in the pam.d folder. The closest I can think of are the five common-* files.

So, from this, I have several questions:

• How do I make that unexpected operator message go away on boot?

• What file do I put the PAM lines suggested by Artix into?

• Do I need the PAM lines at all to run user services?

• Why isn't Devuan's OpenRC adding the softlevel directory into /run/user/1000/openrc?

• Will this become less of a mess as the package is updated in Devuan?