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sansonetto

Member

Registered: 2021-01-08

Posts: 1  

Devuan GNU + Linux 3.0 Beowulf on Lenovo B575e laptop

Hi everybody [sorry for my bad English]

I inherited this laptop running Ubuntu, bought with FreeDOS installed, a Lenovo B575e from four five years ago. Ubuntu by now was pretty stuck, but in any case I would never use it and therefore let'so go to distrohopping. After some trial and error to understand what worked and what didn't as hardware, I chose to use Devuan. Below I put some general indications on the interventions I had to do to make everything go perfectly (or almost).

First, let's start from the installation of the operating system. The ISO cd is a Net-install of Devuan 3.0 Beowulf, which takes Debian 10 Buster with Sysvinit in place of SystemD and all its related dependency system. The first thing to do is to connect the ethernet cable from the computer to the modem because the wifi Broadcom card is not compatible. During the installation I chose Xfce as the desktop environment, also considering that it is the default one on Devuan, while Debian now pushes GNOME, but also by choice because it always seems to me an excellent compromise between lightness and structure of the desktop. As init I selected Sysvinit because compared to OpenRC it seems to me much better tested on Devuan.

Once the operating system has been installed, we must still remain connected with the ethernet cable to the modem because some WiFi installations have to be made. Sysvinit starts and warns us of a problem on the Radeon graphics drivers and in the network connection, so once we logged in with Slim (which I love, much nicer than lightdm and the others, it takes me back to BSD) here we are in Xfce.

First of all, having chosen the default desktop setting, I'm going to make the first changes that I always do with Xfce, that is to delete the panel at the bottom (the one with the icons) and move the one at the top down. Another change that I find myself forced to make because it bothers me is in the window manager, removing the focus by simply scrolling the mouse and put it on click. I put the classic background of the blue Xfce background with the mouse in the center and now let's get to the serious things to do.

First of all on pulseaudio we have to make a change: from the terminal with the mousepad editor we open /etc/pulse/client.conf.d/00-disable-autospawn.conf and comment # autospawn = no
Once this is done we also have to fix a detail of the Grub that still brings us back to Debian, open with the editor /etc/os-release and replace Debian with Devuan. Then you have to update Grub and to do that I open Synaptic and reinstall Grub-pc.

Since I'm in Synaptic I have to do the two or three most important installations. First, to get the wifi to work I search for Broadcom in the Synaptic search bar and install the various firmware components needed via broadcom-sta-dkms. The same thing I do for the graphics drivers, searching for Radeon and installing firmware-amd-graphics. Almost there, I install the TouchPad Synaptics drivers for the X.Org server via xserver-xorg-input-synaptics. It is also important to install ifupdown2 for that problem on the network I mentioned at the beginning. Here we are, we have done practically everything, I restart the computer, click on the touchpad and install the main programs that I usually use.

Having done an installation from ISO net-install we have already updated everything, so I just have to put what I want. Specifically, Firefox is already there and then I put the usual addons, disable javascript and restrictive privacy settings, then I download Sylpheed as an email client, then Gimp, Smplayer, Transmission, Audacity, Galculator, and something else. To change the slim screen I go to etc / slim.conf and put default instead of current theme.

I was having trouble turning on my computer, even before starting GRUB. I did update initramfs, always via the reinstall option on Synaptic and it seems that everything is fine now.

I hope these simple indications (for my very basic GNU user level) will be useful to someone.

Last edited by sansonetto (2021-01-08 13:51:08)