Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

krauser · 2019-05-10 12:33:13

Hello everyone, my first post here.
I'm thinking of using Devuan and free myself from systemd. I have a couple questions before I do so:
- Are there any plans to implement runit by default or just as solid an implementation as the current init, in the future? I checked the main web page and it says you guys use SysV but have also openrc and runit on development.

- While I doubt Debian repositories work as intended on Devuan, let's say I want to install Lutris. The most common way to do that under Debian is to add a repo and then update and install. Could I add that Debian repo on Devuan? Or should I just build Lutris from source?

Thanks in advance

Last edited by krauser (2019-05-10 12:33:30)

fsmithred · 2019-05-10 13:51:30

Sysvinit will continue to be the default init system in devuan. Openrc is available, working and easy to install. I'm not sure of the status of runit (or S6 for that matter) but they exist and people are working on it.

I don't know anything about Lutris, but any packages not in the debian repos that you can install by adding a repo should also work in devuan, unless systemd is required. For example, I know that virtualbox from Oracle works.

And if something you want is in the debian repos, then it's also in the devuan repos, as long as it does not require systemd. So you don't need to use any debian repos in sources.list. (If you do, you're sure to run into problems.)

crankypuss · 2019-05-10 14:23:52

fsmithred wrote:

Sysvinit will continue to be the default init system in devuan. Openrc is available, working and easy to install. I'm not sure of the status of runit (or S6 for that matter) but they exist and people are working on it.

What about newly developed init systems? I've never used git. How do people go about getting new projects added to the devuan distro? Are we talking about "joe's ppa" until somehow checked out, or how does that work? This is probably the wrong place to ask this from a developer's pov, i'll continue in another section as appropriate, but since i am working on something of that nature, i didn't want to just scroll past and forget about it. IMO it's a disgrace that there's no linux distro that will start up in less than a second on some average mid-level machine. But then i'm cranky, lol.

rolfie · 2019-05-10 21:01:30

@krauser: give ASCII a try, its Stretch without systemd. If you want to install external packages that are available for Debian use the Stretch package and it works.

Rolf

Last edited by rolfie (2019-05-11 19:23:37)

golinux · 2019-05-10 21:17:58

rolfie wrote:

If you want to install external packages that are available in Debian use the Stretch package and it works.

Not a good idea - installing directly from Debian repos could put you in a world of hurt. Devuan filters the Debian repos and bans packages that could break your system. The Debian packages that won't break Devuan are already provided via redirect to the Devuan repos.

Dutch_Master · 2019-05-11 11:49:21

crankypuss wrote:

IMO it's a disgrace that there's no linux distro that will start up in less than a second on some average mid-level machine.

Name me any OS that performs this from a cold start.

I had, for a time, a moderately spec'd desktop that could do a cold start in under 10 seconds, using an SSD, running Funtoo. This was with a Grub time-out period, so effectively it could boot in under 5 seconds. I'm still on the same hardware, but as I had to change OS due to Funtoo's inability to perform an intelligent update/upgrade w/o breaking virtually anything, switching to Devuan, it takes a little longer to boot, but still below 30 sec.

pcalvert · 2019-05-11 14:01:01

krauser wrote:

While I doubt Debian repositories work as intended on Devuan, let's say I want to install Lutris. The most common way to do that under Debian is to add a repo and then update and install. Could I add that Debian repo on Devuan?

Yes. The instructions for Debian found on this web page should also work for Devuan:

https://lutris.net/downloads/

Phil

rolfie · 2019-05-11 19:23:11

golinux wrote:

rolfie wrote:
If you want to install external packages that are available for Debian use the Stretch package and it works.
Not a good idea - installing directly from Debian repos could put you in a world of hurt. Devuan filters the Debian repos and bans packages that could break your system. The Debian packages that won't break Devuan are already provided via redirect to the Devuan repos.

I did not want to suggest that the OP should directly link Debian repos, but when he looks for e.g. Virtual Box from Oracle, that he should use the Debian Stretch package for ASCII.

Rolf

chris2be8 · 2019-05-12 16:01:27

Dutch_Master wrote:

crankypuss wrote:
IMO it's a disgrace that there's no linux distro that will start up in less than a second on some average mid-level machine.
Name me any OS that performs this from a cold start.
I had, for a time, a moderately spec'd desktop that could do a cold start in under 10 seconds, using an SSD, running Funtoo. This was with a Grub time-out period, so effectively it could boot in under 5 seconds. I'm still on the same hardware, but as I had to change OS due to Funtoo's inability to perform an intelligent update/upgrade w/o breaking virtually anything, switching to Devuan, it takes a little longer to boot, but still below 30 sec.

My Dragon 32 booted up in about half a second. But it's older than most of the people on the list (built in 1982 if I remember correctly). Boot up times are a nice example of Gates Law (Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster).

Chris

Head_on_a_Stick · 2019-05-12 16:40:13

crankypuss wrote:

it's a disgrace that there's no linux distro that will start up in less than a second on some average mid-level machine

How about a sub-2-second boot on an i7-2677M (with an SSD)?

http://git.fenrus.org/tmp/bootchart-20120512-1036.svg

But that's using the init-system-that-shall-not-be-named...

I'll get my coat

crankypuss · 2019-05-13 01:55:04

Dutch_Master wrote:

crankypuss wrote:
IMO it's a disgrace that there's no linux distro that will start up in less than a second on some average mid-level machine.
Name me any OS that performs this from a cold start.
I had, for a time, a moderately spec'd desktop that could do a cold start in under 10 seconds, using an SSD, running Funtoo. This was with a Grub time-out period, so effectively it could boot in under 5 seconds. I'm still on the same hardware, but as I had to change OS due to Funtoo's inability to perform an intelligent update/upgrade w/o breaking virtually anything, switching to Devuan, it takes a little longer to boot, but still below 30 sec.

BeOS used to fwiw, before it was more profitable to put it down. How long does it take to restart linux from hibernation? Exactly why can't shutdown act as a beefed-up hibernate? How long does it take to compare previous-hardware with current-hardware? Exactly why can't a hibernated system be distributed as the install iso, you just have to be able to boot from the damn thing.

Light your brains up, folks. Too many blows to the head from a red head covering seems to have busted some freedom of thought.

fsmithred · 2019-05-13 12:55:00

crankypuss wrote:

Exactly why can't a hibernated system be distributed as the install iso, you just have to be able to boot from the damn thing.

A hibernated system already knows what hardware you have, where it is and what modules need to be loaded. That saves a lot of time.

Currently, you can use the installer isos to install directly from the medium to avoid having to download the packages. That can save you some time, but those packages still need to be unpacked and configured. Or you can use the live isos and avoid downloading, unpacking and configuring the packages, but then you don't get to choose what packages are installed.

If you want a package selection that's different from the default, then you either have to do it yourself starting from a minimal install, or you have to find a derivative distribution that has what you want.

I keep thinking of other ways to do this, but I haven't come up with anything that I think is good enough to replace what we already have.

vader · 2019-05-13 22:13:32

Fast bootup times can be deceiving - yes, you can get a graphical login screen in 2 seconds, however your hardware might not be setup yet. I write drivers as part of my job, and it can take a while for hardware to become active. I reboot every year or so, so fast bootup doesn't really worry me. You could always stay in grub - you can look at files, create, copy etc. That is near instantaneous! Oh, you can't surf the net? Then wait till the system is ready (PS. that was a joke, I wasn't serious for all those with sarcasm filter removed.....)

On the other question, you can always compile from source - most (if not all by definition) open source projects have access to source. You can get the source, and normally follow the bouncing ball.

Ogis1975 · 2019-05-14 14:16:40

Dutch_Master wrote:

I had, for a time, a moderately spec'd desktop that could do a cold start in under 10 seconds, using an SSD, running Funtoo.

My Debian machine do a cold start in uder 10 sec. Same with Devuan Ascii. Of course I don't use any display managers, or DE. Only

startx

and old good iceWM.

Dutch_Master · 2019-05-14 22:05:48

I used Mate/LightDM Having said that, Funtoo is based on Gentoo and has OpenRC as init system, which is highly parallelized. IMO a modern system based on NVMe M.2 or PCIe SSD's with OpenRC would be able to cut cold-start boot times to below 3-5 seconds. Currently, manufacturers claim to have approached the theoretical band-width of PCIe (4Gb/s) in the latest incarnations of PCIe based SSD's (including NVMe) at 3.7 Gb/s read/write. Personally, I foresee that SATA will follow the likes of IDE, ISA and APG within the next 5 years as PCIe and whatever follows it will render the "old" SATA bus obsolete.

But then, what do I know

crankypuss · 2019-05-18 01:17:35

fsmithred wrote:

crankypuss wrote:
Exactly why can't a hibernated system be distributed as the install iso, you just have to be able to boot from the damn thing.
A hibernated system already knows what hardware you have, where it is and what modules need to be loaded. That saves a lot of time.

Yes, and unless the hardware has been changed it will be the same as it was when it was shut down, and if the hardware was changed, you can initialize the new hardware. Unless things have changed in the world it takes much less time to identify the hardware than it does to initialize it.

fsmithred wrote:

Currently, you can use the installer isos to install directly from the medium to avoid having to download the packages. That can save you some time, but those packages still need to be unpacked and configured. Or you can use the live isos and avoid downloading, unpacking and configuring the packages, but then you don't get to choose what packages are installed.
If you want a package selection that's different from the default, then you either have to do it yourself starting from a minimal install, or you have to find a derivative distribution that has what you want.
I keep thinking of other ways to do this, but I haven't come up with anything that I think is good enough to replace what we already have.

If you have a minimal Devuan install it can be copied to the target partition with rsync (or dd, though rsync is faster in my experience) and assuming all the drivers are present it'll start right up like a champ. Then you can install whatever you want. The trick to that part seems to be that there's no really good/comprehensive customization facility; apt is great if you already know what you want to do, synaptic is easier but still needs some user understanding.

Dutch_Master · 2019-05-18 08:19:23

You may want to investigate the stage3/stage4 tarballs used in Gentoo/Funtoo as these offer a good deal of the functionality you describe.

HTH!

fsmithred · 2019-05-18 18:56:52

If you have a minimal Devuan install it can be copied to the target partition with rsync

We do have that:
https://files.roundr.devuan.org/devuan_ … imal-live/

krauser · 2019-05-30 16:23:19

So I just installed and upgraded to Beowulf. Smooth as silk, only had to comment out a line on pulseaudio which was indicated during the apt dist-upgrade process
Something weird(or maybe it's not) is happening though. When I use apt update, upgrade or install, I get this message

~$ apt list --upgradable 
Listing... Done
elogind/testing 241.1-1 amd64 [upgradable from: 234.4-2]
libelogind0/testing 241.1-1 amd64 [upgradable from: 234.4-2]
libpam-elogind/testing 241.1-1 amd64 [upgradable from: 234.4-2]
# sudo apt upgrade 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  elogind libelogind0 libpam-elogind
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.

I've tried some commands but those 3 packages are simply being held and nothing seems to make them go away or upgrade them.

Last edited by krauser (2019-05-30 16:24:06)

Head_on_a_Stick · 2019-05-30 18:04:27

krauser wrote:

I've tried some commands but those 3 packages are simply being held and nothing seems to make them go away or upgrade them.

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2762

krauser · 2019-05-30 18:57:27

Head_on_a_Stick wrote:

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2762

edit: Nevermind, didn't realize there was a second page with the solution. Thanks
Just had to

apt install libelogind0=241.1-1

and done, no more held packages.

Last edited by krauser (2019-05-30 19:01:56)

RJVB · 2020-07-24 21:54:47

Hello - I'm new here, I hope it's OK to jump into a not-so-recent thread like this.

If I understand correctly, one shouldn't use Debian's repositories but one can use the repositories certain companies put online (Oracle for VirtualBox, Mozilla for Firefox and Thunderbird, LLVM for clang etc) and install packages from those repos (as long as they don't depend on packages only available from Debian or Ubuntu).

I'm currently using KUbuntu 14.04 with an increasing number of packages I backported myself from later versions or simply built locally and installed in a parallel prefix. Sooner or later I will have to upgrade and I'd rather not go the systemd route. The LaunchPad PPAs I maintain also contain other software that's not a backport (like Freetype/FontContfig/Cairo with the Infinality patches).
Do I understand correctly that I should in principle be able to continue to use these PPAs?

Thanks!

golinux · 2020-07-24 22:45:08

Use PPAs with Debian or Devuan at your own risk. Please take DontBreakDebian to heart. Also read this page on the Devuan website.

edit: corrected incomplete link

RJVB · 2020-07-25 08:29:44

golinux wrote:

Use PPAs with Debian or Devuan at your own risk. Please take DontBreakDebian to heart.

It always makes me chuckle when people suggest that any use of free software (esp. under the GPL) isn't entirely at your own risk... It's very easy on Ubuntu too to break something with an illconceived package from a PPA. In fact, using multiple package sources in a design that's already subject to dependency nightmares (split packages with individual, versioned dependencies) is already a recipe for disaster in itself. Been there, done that... (heck, I almost lost my entire install because I thought I could simply back out of experimenting with the official systemd package for Trusty, without using ZFS snapshots as a safety net).

Was it your intention to link to the generic Debian wiki landing page (on which I didn't see a DontBreakDebian section)?

Do Debian and/or Devuan have a similar site/service in place? Upgrading to just about any newer distro would presumably rob me of my preferred (minimalistic) KDE Plasma4 (sic, Four) DE so I'd be very tempted to get that up and running myself and evidently I'd prefer to be able to use an external build service for that.

EDIT: there must be a matching Ubuntu version for any given Devuan distribution version, that has the crucial libraries should be in the same place, right? If so, a Launchpad PPA with custom packages based on the Devuan packaging metadata (the `debian` subdir) ought not be too risky?

Last edited by RJVB (2020-07-25 08:41:45)

golinux · 2020-07-25 16:01:36

RJVB wrote:

Was it your intention to link to the generic Debian wiki landing page (on which I didn't see a DontBreakDebian section)?

Of course not. I fixed it.

The officially official Devuan Forum!

#1 2019-05-10 12:33:13

Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#2 2019-05-10 13:51:30

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#3 2019-05-10 14:23:52

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#4 2019-05-10 21:01:30

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#5 2019-05-10 21:17:58

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#6 2019-05-11 11:49:21

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#7 2019-05-11 14:01:01

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#8 2019-05-11 19:23:11

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#9 2019-05-12 16:01:27

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#10 2019-05-12 16:40:13

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#11 2019-05-13 01:55:04

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#12 2019-05-13 12:55:00

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#13 2019-05-13 22:13:32

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#14 2019-05-14 14:16:40

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#15 2019-05-14 22:05:48

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#16 2019-05-18 01:17:35

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#17 2019-05-18 08:19:23

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#18 2019-05-18 18:56:52

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#19 2019-05-30 16:23:19

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#20 2019-05-30 18:04:27

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#21 2019-05-30 18:57:27

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#22 2020-07-24 21:54:47

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#23 2020-07-24 22:45:08

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#24 2020-07-25 08:29:44

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

#25 2020-07-25 16:01:36

Re: Interested in installing devuan, couple questions before I do

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