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Geoff 42

Member

Registered: 2016-12-15

Posts: 462  

Devuan Ascii with LXDE/LXQT

About a year ago I wanted to install Devuan on my new laptop, an Asus ZenBook UX305FA, I read that I needed a reasonably up-to-date kernel to handle the cpus correctly. In order to do this I installed Testing, starting with Debian to check that it worked ok. Having decided that it was working correctly, I then upgraded it to Devan Ascii and it largely seemed to work ok.

While I like LXDE I also installed XFCE in case I needed any of the applications. After a bit of reading it seemed that the LXDE people were moving over to using QT and calling it LXQT. I thought that I ought to see if this was working, before I got too far with setting things up. Anyway, around May this year (2016), I installed LXQT and tried it out and it seems to work reasonably well. I have lxdm running as the display manager and this works well. On the logout question, I can use lxqt to logout and then from the lxdm screen I can shutdown the machine.

I am using wicd to look after the wi-fi.

When I grep through the output of dmesg for systemd, the only thing I find is systemd-udev, which is, I believe to be expected.

Geoff

Geoff 42

Member

Registered: 2016-12-15

Posts: 462  

Re: Devuan Ascii with LXDE/LXQT

Having upgraded my desktop machine to Devuan Jessie, I thought it was time to return to my Ascii/Testing laptop and tidy things up.

My initial upgrade had consisted of updating /etc/apt/sources.list so that the active lines were :-

deb http://auto.mirrors.devuan.org/merged/ ascii main contrib non-free  
deb http://auto.mirrors.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-security main contrib non-free  
deb http://auto.mirrors.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-updates main contrib non-free  

and then performing apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade.
At various times I had installed LXDE, XFCE and LXQT.

I decided to follow what I had done with my Jessie desktop machine, but with lxqt instead of lxde, which was roughly equivalent to :-

apt-get purge systemd-shim libsystemd0
apt-get autoremove
apt-get install lxqt
apt-get install xserver-xorg-core
apt-get install xorg
apt-get install libreoffice libreoffice-gtk
apt-get install policykit-1

The initial purge removed a lot, including lxde, lxqt and xfce as well as xserver, xorg, nfs and cups.
The autoremove removed a very large amount of stuff, over a screen full.
Installing lxqt did not pull in X! Installing xserver-xorg-core made it work well enough that, on rebooting, lxdm would start, but not in a way that I could log in. In fact, all the keys and mouse were dead. I could not remember how much would be running in rescue mode, but fortunately the networking was working and it could find my wired ethernet, so I could run apt-get. Installing xorg got X working and following a reboot I was able to log in to my lxqt session.

But lxqt pulls in libsystemd0.

With lxqt installed an apt-get purge libsystemd0 would now remove :-

libpulse0, libsystemd0, lxqt, lxqt-core, xorg, xserver-xorg...

If I install lxde and then try to purge libsystemd0 it does not want to remove lxde, although without xorg and xserver-xorg, I'm not sure that it would be very useful.
So, I tried it and lxde would install without bringing in libsystemd0, but it would not run. I therefore installed xorg, which does bring in libsystemd0, but does allow lxdm and then lxde to run. I had installed lxdm earlier and it was not removed by my actions described here.

apt-rdepends reports that both lxqt and xorg are dependent on libsystemd0.

It is not currently possible to upgrade gcr and xfconf because of broken packages possibly caused by held packages. I notice that they were both dependent on default-dbus-session-bus|dbus-session-bus, which reminds me of the nicely illustrated post under "Hardware", although after a dist-upgrade they were held back but are now dependent on dbus-x11.

Also upower will not install because :-
upower:
Depends: libimobiledevice4 (>=0.9.7) but it is not installable
Depends: libplist2 (>=1.11) but it is not installable
Depends: libupower-glib1 but it is not going to be installed

and thus, I am unable to install either gnome or xfce -power-manager to see what my battery is doing.

The following installs worked and I could probably have put them all on one line. They replace nfs and vlc which were removed by my earlier efforts and installed Spacefm for further investigation.

apt-get install nfs-common
apt-get install udevil spacefm
apt-get install ssh-askpass
apt-get install vlc

Geoff

Geoff 42

Member

Registered: 2016-12-15

Posts: 462  

Re: Devuan Ascii with LXDE/LXQT

I have been looking at which packages are causing difficulties. There are some dependent on libsystemd0 and some which are broken. I think that /etc/apt/preferences.d/avoid-systemd was added when I upgraded to Devuan, but it was some time ago...

$ cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/avoid-systemd
Package: systemd-sysv
Pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: -1

Dependencies on libsystemd0 et al. which I spotted include :-

cups-daemon > libsystemd0
nfs-common > rpcbind > libsystemd0
xorg
  xserver-xorg-core > libsystemd0
lxqt
  lxqt-policykit > libpolkit-qt5-1-1 > libpam-systemd|consolekit
                                        \ > systemd systemd-shim|systemd-sysv
  lxqt-panel > libpulse0 > libsystemd0
Chromium
  chromium > libpulse0 > libsystemd0

I notice that xserver-xorg-core also has a dependency on libwayland-server0 and -client0, which I think was there in Jessie. I don't think that this causes any problems, although it does appear to lead to a circular dependency between libc6 and libgcc1.
I think lxqt-policykit is not currently a problem as there is the option to use consolekit, but lxqt-panel is a problem.

gcr & xfconf - installed and broken - unable to upgrade
gksu  - unable to install and broken as it requires gnome key ring
upower - unable to install and broken

xfce4-power-manager > upower (>= 0.99) unable to install as it depends on libplist2,
   which appears not to exist, although there is a libplist3

$ aptitude why-not upower
Not currently installed
The candidate version 1:0.9.23-2+devuan1.2 has priority optional
No dependencies require to remove upower

# apt-get install libplist2
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package libplist2 is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'libplist2' has no installation candidate

Geoff

Last edited by Geoff 42 (2017-01-17 09:37:59)

Geoff 42

Member

Registered: 2016-12-15

Posts: 462  

Re: Devuan Ascii with LXDE/LXQT

Since upower depends on libplist2, and I was unable to install the Ascii version, I thought that I would see if I could install the Jessie version of upower. I did this by commenting out the ascii lines from /etc/apt/sources.list and put an entry in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jessie.list

deb http://auto.mirrors.devuan.org/merged/ jessie main

and then did an update and then installed upower. This then pulled in libplist2, libusbmuxd2, libimobiledevice4 & libupower-glib1 from the Jessie repo. I then commented out the jessie line and restored the ascii lines in sources.list, followed by an update. I followed this with apt-get dist-upgrade and there was nothing to upgrade and no reports of further broken packages.

In the efforts to remove libsystemd0, while parts of lxqt were removed, several applications were left behind. lxqt-powermanagement remains but was not working without upower, but it is now working and is displaying the battery status.

Geoff

Geoff 42

Member

Registered: 2016-12-15

Posts: 462  

Re: Devuan Ascii with LXDE/LXQT

Following the announcement that the Amprolla3 repositories were now working, I thought that I should test them out on my ascii laptop.
I first upgraded and installed the https transport

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install apt-transport-https

This upgraded a lot of stuff in the usual way with no problems, including devuan-keyring, to version 2017.10.03

The repositories were then updated to use the new Amprolla3 ones.
The only uncommented lines in /etc/apt/sources.list are now :-

deb https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii main contrib non-free 
deb https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-backports main contrib non-free 
deb https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-proposed-updates main contrib non-free 
deb https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-security main contrib non-free 
deb https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ascii-updates main contrib non-free 
deb https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/devuan/ ascii-proposed main contrib non-free 
deb https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/devuan/ ascii-proposed-security main contrib non-free 

as implied in the post at https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=5794#p5794
None of the files in the sources.list.d sub-directory contain any uncommented files.

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get autoremove

then behaved as expected and upgraded some more stuff, including openssl and xserver-xorg-core.

It seems to be working as smoothly as ever. Thank you!

Geoff