Hi,

there is a 2.02+dfsg1-9 in Ceres, which introduced a change to not enforce signature check if Secure Boot is disabled (as it seems to be the case here). Could you please try it?

HND

KatolaZ

What you are describing above is exactly the netinst image (or the cdrom/dvd image for that matter), which are all isohybrid and can be put in a USB stick. The "menu" you are referring to is called "tasksel", has been in Debian (and most of the derivatives) for the best part of the last 15 years, and is indeed launched after the base system has been installed. It has a few installation options (Desktop, Basic system tools, Web Server, etc), which are based on the debs that are indeed available in the medium (or all of them, if you have network connection). And guess what: it is implemented through a meta-package for each install type :-)

The Devuan version contains as options the supported desktop environments, plus a "Console productivity" option, plus a few more choices. Just try the "_netinst" image, or the cdrom/dvd images under "installer_iso":

https://files.devuan.org/devuan_ascii/installer-iso/

The only difference with your vision is that, AFAIK, d-i does not allow to download the packages for future installations: it works on a one-shot basis. You decide what you want to get, and it does the job.

This is slightly harder to achieve, since dpkg is a stateful package management system, and needs a working system to work properly (or at all). That's why it is relatively difficult to run a debian-installer-like installer as a "user process" under any other distribution: you need a meaningful /var/lib/dpkg and /var/lib/apt for the whole thing to work. Nevertheless, d-i is scriptable, and you can easily provide a conf file for an automated install to be replicated in several machines. But this is not a "end-user" kind of scenario, so you are expected to read some documentation about that ;-)

HND

KatolaZ

Hi,

I should start by saying that in any technical discussion I am never impressed at all by names, or nicknames, or CVs, or titles. I just look at facts and actions.

I thank esr for his post, but I really don't see much point into it. The main mission of Devuan is to provide a Debian without systemd, not to dominate the world or to outcompete Ubuntu or any other distribution. The mission of Devuan is to provide choice.

Now, there are people that have worked and are working to transform the Devuan's mission into reality, which translates to providing packages, releases, infrastructure, documentation, and services. These people work on Devuan on a voluntary basis, and it is not a mistery that the number of active Devuan developers is far smaller than the number of paid Ubuntu developers (which apparenty amounts to at least several dozens). As a result, those Devuan developers have had to focus on one main objective: make Devuan exist, against all odds and despite the well-informed have predicted its death many times.

On the more technical side:

-the install images that are offered are only those that are actually used by Devuan users;

- the comment about firmware is a bit out of scope as well: Devuan is already installing automatically all the firmware (free or non-free) needed by the underlying hardware. This does not include, so far, proprietary video devices. If there are people with an interest in that, they are welcome to join in, propose patches, write workarounds.

I agree that usability is important, and in fact the effort to provide a usable session-management that did not depend on systemd was the main reason why Devuan ASCII release was delayed by several months. A lot of Devuaners helped to let it become a reality, by installing, testing, reporting problems, and the merit of that achievement is only theirs. But Devuan does not have the energy to outcompete Ubuntu on usability. This might put off entire classes of users, but we can't do much about it. We just don't have the energy to do that. We need to focus the human power we have on ensuring that Devuan keeps existing and providing choice.

In general, my opinion is that writing rants pointing towards what does not work in other's people efforts is relatively easy, and telling others what they should do and what they should not do is quite cheap. Anybody can do that. Literally, anybody. However, if four years ago the VUAs had just written a rant on a Debian forum, pointing to all the odds and mishaps of adopting systemd, and promising that they would have contributed to Debian if and only if Debian had removed systemd, well, if they had just stopped after having written a post on a Debian forum then Devuan would most probably not exist at all today, and this thread (and this very forum) would not exist as well.

Devuan came to existence because a bunch of people that everybody labelled as "mad" actually sat in front of a keyboard and hacked a way around the systemd madness, while the rest of the community was still flaming on forums and mailing lists. This was made possible by dozens times many more "mad" people who believed that the work of those hackers was worth the effort, and put energy, encouragement, support, and money to help them in their quest. This effort was most probably inspired by the words of the wise Guru in "The Loginataka" http://www.catb.org/~esr//faqs/loginataka.html:

These words are often (but maybe imprecisely, since the wise Guru was much wiser than any other sage or prophet) translated with the more prosaic:

Devuan is an example that it is possible to live up to that standard. Literally anybody is welcome to join the quest, if they are ready to live up to that standard as well. Devuan does not need phylosophers, or prophets to show "The right way forward". The predicament of the wise Guru is enough: Devuan needs hackers to get the job done. There is plenty of room at the bottom.

HND

KatolaZ

Hi mknoop,

thanks for the report and sorry for the breakage. The bottom-line is that ceres is not ready for prime-time. That's why it's called "unstable", after all. task-xcfe-desktop will not work in ceres atm, since there is a problem with policykit-1. You can install the xfce4 components by hand (start with the package xfce4), but at the moment you will not get a functioning session management in ceres.

HTH

KatolaZ

Hi All,

I think disablng Check-Valid-Until is not a particularly good idea, and I would not recommend it for anything more than a local mirror. Also, it is a good habit to check the signatures on Release and InRelease files (and the Valid-Until field) at least one after every rsync of your local mirror from a remote mirror, by either re-ebabling Acquire::Check-Valid-Until and giving an `apt-get update`,  or by manually verifying the signature with gpg. Well, to be honest apt would complain anyway if something looks dodgy...

My2Cents

KatolaZ

If I can add two cents to the discussion:

The point is not that we don't know how to ask the user if they want to use non-free software or not  at install time:-) Devuan has decided to ship non-free firmware in the install media. Now if a user needs non-free firmware, they ought have contrib and non-free in their sources.list, otherwise their wifi card (or worse, their CPU) will stop working at the first kernel upgrade, effectively nullifying the potential benefits of having non-free firmware available at all. If we provide non-free firmware, and then ask the user if they want non-free software or not, this will just cause breakage.

We could definitely consider providing a version of netinst without non-free firmware. But please, do not assume any "bad will" on Devuan's side: any new little thing that you dream of requires time and effort to be transformed into reality. Devuan does not have hundreds of developers. If you see anything that "should be absolutely done!", please consider whether you can help with that, and shout out on #devuan-dev.

HND

KatolaZ

Hi Chris,

how exactly are you "testing" those? We are continuosly checking all the mirrors behind deb.devuan.org and have not found any issue. You simply can't "point your browser" to those IPs, since you have to present a valid "Host: deb.devuan.org" header. If you know what I mean, you know how to work around it with wget/curl. If you don't, it's a bit too complicated to explain here. Basically, apt does the right thing, while your browser won't.

I guess the mishap with the mirror you talk about is due to a temporary glitch. I have also contacted the mirror administrator who has confirmed that the server is (and has been) up and running. Luckily there are several thousand people using deb.devuan.org, so we get to know about glitches pretty soon.

HTH

KatolaZ

Devuan repos are not available through ftp. And goo has already said that the problem is not in the repos, since he/she can reach the repos from the chroot. Regarding the HTTP redirect: it's perfectly fine, since this is how Devuan repos work (serving packages forked by Devuan directly and redirecting to the Debian repos otherwise). Why don't you try to use one of the Devuan arm images available, if any of them would fit your arch?

Hi,

please post the output of:

  apt-cache policy lib32tindo-dev

And, have you run:

  apt-get update

before trying to install the g++-multilib package? It currently installs just fine here using the same repos as yours.

Regards

It seems absurd to have to restate the obvious again and again, but there we go.

Devuan GNU+Linux is a Linux distribution forked from Debian in 2014. More info about Devuan can be found at:

  http://www.devuan.org

A detailed explanation of why Devuan came to existence can be found at:

  https://devuan.org/os/debian-fork

Official Devuan installation images and live isos can be downloaded at:

  http://files.devuan.org

Devuan has no generals, no colonels, no sergeants, no soldiers, no badges or shiny stickers. Devuan has users. There are a lot of ways in which Devuan users can help Devuan. A non-comprehensive list can be found at:

  https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1380#p1380

The concept of "derivative" should be very clear to anybody that has been around the Free Software movement in the last 25 years or so, but there you go. A Devuan derivative is an independent project which uses Devuan as a base. Devuan encourages users to make their own derivatives, and makes available easy-to-use tools to create respins and personalisations, but this does not mean that Devuan "wants" derivatives. There is no "Official Devuan Derivative" programme,and no "Devuan derivative" badge to show off. Devuan does not provide any endorsement to any derivative (in the same way as Debian does not endorse Mint or Ubuntu, in the same way as RedHat does not endorse Scientific Linux). The list of existing Devuan derivatives is just meant as a service to Devuan users. That list might be reviewed every now and then, and new derivatives might be added after having been reviewed to check that they do what they promise (nobody wants to have a Fedora derivative in that list, right?). But that's not among Devuan's priorities. Devuan's priority is to provide a free, universal, stable, dependable operating system called "Devuan GNU+Linux".

Quite often, the developers of Devuan derivatives are active members of the Devuan community, which can be roughly defined as the union of the sets of Devuan users, subscribers to DNG, participants to this forum and to the #devuan IRC channel, etc. They normally provide "positive contributions" to the Devuan community, where a "positive contribution" could be in the form of helping other users, suggesting tips, providing bug reports and patches, participating to the discussions with pertinent comments, and so on.

I am convinced that, just to make a random example, vomiting nonsense about Devuan in this and other forums has little chance to be considered a "positive contribution" to the Devuan community by any mentally sane person, as much as spiralling into endless discussions about what a Devuan derivative is, or might be, or should be, or inventing yet another effective way to decide which colour the bike shed should be painted.But that's just my personal opinion. Reality is that there are no bike sheds to paint, and no bikes to put in there.

HTH

KatolaZ

I think we should all calm down a bit :-)

Just to clarify:

1) Devuan has decided to provide non-free firmware packages in the install media, and this is not due to change at the moment.

2) Nevertheless, it would be better to always ask the users if they want to use those firmware at install time or not. There seem to be a glitch in hw-detect (one of the d-i components) which does not ask the question under some conditions, and installs the needed non-free firmware anyway. We are trying to understand why and will fix it, hopefully before the next release.

There is little point into flaming, IMHO. I hope at least as many contributors wuold be willing to test the fixes before the next release ;-)

Just shout on #devuan-dev.

Can you please post the sources.list file that you found in your system at the end of the installation? That would be helpful.

Regards

KatolaZ