Posts by chabala

chabala · Devuan Derivatives

Does your /etc/os-release (or whatever it points to if it's a symlink) have data in it?

My best guess is that my install failed in some way and that it should be populated instead of empty.

chabala · Devuan Derivatives

Looks like I'm running Debian something:

$ uname -a
Linux hp845g8 6.1.0-49-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.174-1 (2026-05-26) x86_64 GNU/Linux

I can make scripts:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

shopt -s nullglob

for file in /etc/*version /etc/*release; do
    echo "$file:"
    cat "$file"
done

$ ./checkRelease 
/etc/debian_version:
12.6
/etc/devuan_version:
daedalus
/etc/os-release:

But, do we need to code-golf this? Or can we just put some data in the os-release file?

chabala · Devuan Derivatives

Yes:

$ cat /etc/debian_version
12.6
$ cat /etc/devuan_version
daedalus

No obvious peppermint_version file in /etc though.

But then, one has to remember that one is running devuan to know to check for devuan_version. So if I wanted a generic command to show me release information, it could become a script full of conditional checks like:

[ -s "/etc/redhat-release" ] && cat /etc/redhat-release
[ -s "/etc/arch-release" ] && cat /etc/arch-release
[ -s "/etc/debian_version" ] && cat /etc/debian_version
[ -s "/etc/devuan_version" ] && cat /etc/devuan_version

or, we could populate the /etc/os-release file, and not need a script. Some of those other tools I mentioned might even be able to find the information too.

chabala · Devuan Derivatives

I'm running Devuan-based PeppermintOS. Which version, you might ask; I've found it's difficult to tell.

I've noticed that all the places I'm used to looking to see my release information seem to be unpopulated:

neofetch: "OS: n/a x86_64"

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: n/a
Description: n/a
Release: n/a
Codename: n/a

$ ll /etc/os-release
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 Jun 30 2024 /etc/os-release -> ../usr/lib/os-release

$ ll /usr/lib/os-release
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Feb 20 08:42 /usr/lib/os-release

I know the whole point is not using systemd, but surely putting some release information in one of the well known locations would be good. Pretty sure the LSB spec isn't systemd specific.

Is there another distro-specific release information file I don't know about?

chabala · Documentation

This was helpful. Some additions:

Current compose version is 5.1.3 (they decided to burn some major numbers to reduce confusion), so download link is:

sudo wget -c https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/v5.1.3/docker-compose-`uname -s`-`uname -m` -O /usr/local/bin/docker-compose; sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

If you want

docker compose

to work, rather than just

docker-compose

one can make directories at

$HOME/.docker/cli-plugins

and then make a symlink to the docker-compose binary like

ln -s /usr/local/bin/docker-compose docker-compose

Then the following should work:

$ docker compose version
Docker Compose version v5.1.3

The officially official Devuan Forum!

#1 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Where is the release information stored? » 2026-07-06 17:12:05

#2 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Where is the release information stored? » 2026-06-19 16:45:16

#3 Re: Devuan Derivatives » Where is the release information stored? » 2026-06-19 04:02:30

#4 Devuan Derivatives » Where is the release information stored? » 2026-06-10 01:39:49

#5 Re: Documentation » Install Docker on Devuan » 2026-04-20 19:07:15

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