A magazine-format publication, that does things right, with the hyperlinks! And proper page layout should anybody ever print the thing! This could almost persuade me to like Ubuntu. That was such a great experience, I think I will have to read this magazine going forward. Of course I've got a stray Ubuntu install somewhere, mostly as Xubuntu. However, I typically have been a CentOS or now Devuan guy.

Anyway, to the article at hand. I thought it was quite nice the fellow wrote a whole review. I appreciate the casual yet still formal-enough writing style. He stylizes Devuan funny. The very Linuxy thing to say: "Set it up so it works for YOU!" was pretty nice, even though he repeats it a lot.

Of course the "plain" and "boxy" interface of Xfce reminds him of boring old Windows 95/98. I think that's why people choose it: it works, as expected, is low key, and doesn't get in the way. I'm a little surprised when he was editing the panels the little red dashed outline didn't appear on the current panel. It always does that for me, running Devuan ceres with Xfce. His panel transparency didn't work: I haven't tried it myself, but I would certainly expect it to depend on desktop compositing, which is not obvious to a "general user."

His experience with setting the wallpaper: that is an Xfce thing that is fairly typical. I consider it a minor deficiency in the wallpaper chooser, but as he found, it's not hard to do it another way. If I recall correctly, all you have to do in the wallpaper settings is to select "Choose a directory" or some such, from the drop down, which is not obvious.

"XFCE's implementation of bash." Because of course I'm being picky and crotchety, it's Xfce's terminal emulator. It's still the same old bash everyone else uses. But I think most people know what he means. And his choice of Control-Alt-T is just a default different from his. I think that is a Xubuntu thing. Ah, which is probably derived from Ubuntu proper. Hm.

He talks about how wicd is better than the built-in powerful wifi management program. Is he talking about wpa_supplicant? Perhaps he just is not accurate here. I don't really know what I'm talking about either, but Devuan did introduce me to wicd which I absolutely love, even if only because it's not spelled NetworkManager.

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A Linux-themed crossword puzzle?! I think I'm in love. However, I apparently really suck at Linux trivia.

Thank you! I appreciate all the effort the real devuaners do. I'm just a moocher.

You can always just share your experience or participate in other discussions. I'm glad to participate in the Devuan community, even if I don't have that much to say. I do come here with my problems, and I try to make myself available to help other people.

Answered my own question!

This is what I get for doing unattended upgrades in a rolling release. I realize it's entirely my fault.

I have successfully downgraded components necessary so I can get a running sssd client and I can getent passwd bgstack15 again. Thankfully, these components do not require the custom rebuilt packages for devuan. I'm not entirely sure what I would have done in that case.

# set this source:

deb   https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20190901T043449Z/ unstable main

Run commands

sudo apt-get -o Acquire::Check-Valid-Until=false update
sudo apt-get install freeipa-client=4.7.2-3 freeipa-common=4.7.2-3 python-ipaclient=4.7.2-3 sssd=2.2.0-4 python3-sss=2.2.0-4 sssd-ad=2.2.0-4 sssd-common=2.2.0-4 sssd-ipa=2.2.0-4 sssd-krb5=2.2.0-4 sssd-ldap=2.2.0-4 sssd-proxy=2.2.0-4 libsss-idmap0=2.2.0-4 sssd-ad-common=2.2.0-4 sssd-krb5-common=2.2.0-4 libipa-hbac0=2.2.0-4 libsmbclient=2:4.9.11+dfsg-1 samba-libs=2:4.9.11+dfsg-1 libwbclient0=2:4.9.11+dfsg-1

References

https://unix.stackexchange.com/question … cal-mirror
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=debian+releas … is+expired
https://snapshot.debian.org/

I am considering getting a Pinebook myself! I really should, that way I can collaborate with you on getting devuan to work.

If you spend enough time, you can figure out which exact versions of the 64-bit packages you need, so that you can "apt-get install thatpackagename=1.3.4" with exact version numbers. What happened was the i386 packages have a newer version released in the Devuan repos, before the amd64 packages. In a multiarch installation, it appears that all architectures must have the exact same version number for a named package. I ran into this issue on Ceres but maybe that conversation can guide you a little.

As a matter of traditional system security, any users that you are not using should be removed. The fact that these accounts all have /bin/false for the shell leads one to infer that those would never log in, so it probably comes down to file ownership.

You could find any files (particularly in /dev) owned by any of those users.

find / \( -user 117 -o -user 118 -o -user 119 -o -user 120 \) -print

I don't expect any devices to actually be owned by those users, because /dev is populated at boot and sysvinit probably doesn't go around using systemd* users. But that's why you check. For me, it was a little interesting that debian derivatives use lots of local groups to control devices, which makes using domain users on laptops difficult.

Edit:
Or running daemons. But if you're running systemd daemons of some sort underneath sysvinit, uh, we will find ways to help you!

I plan on trying this myself. Some of my laptops have the regular dhcp client delay upon boot, and if I can just let wicd handle it later on, that is acceptable.

Can you not just do

LANG=C xinput --list --long

Or similar?

Sometimes in GNU/Linux, whenever I unplug/plug in something to the audio I/O ports, I have to adjust the volume in the OS before any audio is then sent. I also own a D630, so I can help test stuff as needed. I run only beowulf/ceres, so is that going to be close enough for you?

Thank you for sharing your experience with Devuan on a laptop/tablet device. I am starting to consider a lightweight computer for non-techy family members, and this model sounds decent.

Can you tell me about your experience with any desktop environments on that platform? I'm interested in xfce.

Perusing http://deb.devuan.org/devuan-cd/, it appears that the answer is no. I'm a little surprised, frankly. I can't really keep straight all these silly debian/devuan version numbers. I wish they would just use actual numbers...