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Devuan's Systemd-Free Linux Hits Beta 2 (theregister.co.uk)
Long-time Slashdot reader Billly Gates writes, "For all the systemd haters who want a modern distro feel free to rejoice. The Debian fork called Devuan is almost done, completing a daunting task of stripping systemd dependencies from Debian." From The Register:
Devuan came about after some users felt [Debian] had become too desktop-friendly. The change the greybeards objected to most was the decision to replace sysvinit init with systemd, a move felt to betray core Unix principles of user choice and keeping bloat to a bare minimum.
Supporters of init freedom also dispute assertions that systemd is in all ways superior to sysvinit init, arguing that Debian ignored viable alternatives like sinit, openrc, runit, s6 and shepherd. All are therefore included in Devuan.
Devuan.org now features an "init freedom" logo with the tagline, "watching your first step. Their home page now links to the download site for Devuan Jessie 1.0 Beta2, promising an OS that "avoids entanglement".
Devuan.org now features an "init freedom" logo with the tagline, "watching your first step. Their home page now links to the download site for Devuan Jessie 1.0 Beta2, promising an OS that "avoids entanglement".
Do any of these alternatives offer the same speed benefit of systemd? Serious question as I've never tried to replace the init system on any linux distro.
My one question is logging....
what did they replace SystemD with and how does it log ?
the FAQ and the rest of the site is VERY bare...
If you can run sinit, openrc, runit, s6 and shepherd all at the same time, imagine the speed benefits!
Yes, Microsoft agreed to take over Linux, but only on the condition there would be a registry-like mother-process.
By the way, how is it even possible that one person got so much power in the linux open source community?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
lol! "entanglement" is right!
What did Einstein call quantum entanglement?
"Spooky action at a distance".
What better way to talk about systemd...
Slackware still works great, and has never had systemd.
Is there an option to install it with all non-free repositories disabled by default? As my man RMS says, Debian is better than Ubuntu because it at least segregates packages into free and non-free repositories, but still enables both by default. If the non-free repositories were disabled by default, GNU might finally have a modern distribution it could throw its weight behind.
https://www.gnu.org/distros/fr...
My goal in running a GNU/Linux box is to not run a GNU/Linux box, and Debian and Ubuntu are really nice at that, but I'd like more confidence I'm running only free software than what I have now.
> yay gentoo! Its very easy
no
When talking about Grandmas, this xkcd is better.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Unfortunately, that is very likely.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Not Microsoft. Red Hat.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Issues of systemd aside, all those computers switched on doing nothing use up a boatload of electricity when you total the amount. Not only that, but leaving a machine on allows plenty of time for potential hackers to have a crack at it - unless you specifically switch off networking when you leave it - plus counter to what people think, computer components do wear out when left on, not just fans and spinning disks but also the electronics. If you only use your machine once or twice a day its actually better for it in the long term to switch it off. Sure, of you're only going to keep it for a few years anyway who cares. But I've got a 17 year old linux file server still going that gets used once or twice a week and spends the rest of its time off. And aside from motherboard battery changes its had nothing done to it and its in as good condition now as it was in 99 when I bought it.
Hello Tim Cook, we know it is you, no use posting under AC.
The systemd binary and the systemd project are 2 different beasts, (they should have renamed the project to stop the confusion) once that is understood most of the anti-systemd comments vanish. The system does have 3 dependencies systemd, journal and udev. All the other binaries in the systemd project are optional.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I may be wrong, but isn't it that systemd also depends on things like dbus?
And again the problem is the mindset. Even though it might be possible to run systemd in a sane way, distributions now package it with all sorts of crap. The opposition against systemd is not about systemd itself, it's about people who constantly try to re-invent the wheel while not having understood the problem or how to solve problems in general. Just look at alsa and pulseaudio which were both attempts at fixing the previous state of the art... and making it somewhat worse. (i.e. Alsa created unfathomable device names which were written differently in every application instead of the simple /dev/dsp OSS provided, or pulseaudio added crap like software mixing so you'll enjoy the fun of quantisation noise while it won't allow you to automatically switch the number of output channels based on the number of channels your software outputs)
We can say that of abstraction layers in general.
Well, yes. Fortunately I use not one of the technologies in your list (with the exception of a small number of applications using gtk+, all of them replaceable by others), but the "normal" Linux user begins to be screwed almost as badly as a Windows-user.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I may be wrong, but isn't it that systemd also depends on things like dbus?
Systemd uses the D-Bus protocol for communication (e.g. between the systemctl client and the PID 1 daemon), but a minimal systemd install does not require the D-Bus daemon. That said, you'll be hard pressed to find a Linux desktop systems or server without the D-Bus daemon (no matter what init system is in use), but it'd certainly be possible to build an embedded Linux system with systemd init, and no D-Bus daemon.
Even though it might be possible to run systemd in a sane way, distributions now package it with all sorts of crap.
Really? Ubuntu now ships with systemd service management and the journal (and, yes, udev and the D-Bus daemon, though those have been included for a decade or so). AFAIK, Ubuntu also uses systemd-logind (though it used that even before it switched to systemd init), and doesn't use systemd-networkd (but sticks to NetworkManager), nor does it use systemd's DHCP or NTP services.
Wow. Just Wow! I can't even believe how many ridiculous falsehoods I just read. If systemd was about managing services it would include them? Or didn't you know that NTP, etc are services? You shouldn't have 5 daemons running to support GUI? Why the hell not? You don't seem to understand that under the hood it's background processes all the way down. There is NOTHING wrong with using them what with the fact that the system is designed that way from the ground up. I could go on, but you have made it clear that you have no understanding of the topics about which you are speaking.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
It isn't possible. Your claim is in fact ridiculous. RH and Pottering have nothing to do with Debian or any of the 100s+ distributions that choose to use it.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
You can't "Power Grab" GPL code, but I suspect you knew that before you posted that ridiculous drivel.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
We need a good vim versus emacs war here!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
As one who has been burned by the inability of Windows to recover properly from hibernation, I just go right ahead and shut down. Next time I need it I know I'm getting a clean boot, not some corrupted version of the OS with funky looking screen and partially working subsystems.
I assume from context that you all are describing linux, but for those coming from the Windoze world it's once bitten, twice shy.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
SystemD is available as an option on Gentoo. It is however not the default. If you really want it, you can have it.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
You must have missed the fact that we are indeed talking only about Linux. Yes.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Greybeards?
We may have been programming for longer than Lennart but there are plenty of people younger than him that don't make the same arrogant newbie mistakes about *nix.
Somebody should give Lennart "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" to read since he missed it the first time. It's not difficult but for some reason he does not understand or care and wishes to change linux entirely.
You can fork systemd, except you don't have a team to help you and a company to pay you, so in practice, you can't really.
I do not need to. I can use sysIV init. It is finished, reliable, reasonable fast. No need for maintenance. And in the same venue, I find that packaged that need boot-scripts but do not support sysIV init are not worth using anyways.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Gentoo lets you use systemD if you want to, hence the availability of systemD packages for Gentoo.
However, OpenRC is the default.
*sigh* back to work...
Thousands of projects do what you claim to be impractical every day actually. Maybe you have never heard of distrowatch?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Lots of people who used to work for company A now work for competitor B. It is ludicrous to suggest that their loyalty lies with their former company rather than the one at which they currently work.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Apple has the same problem with launchd.
In Apple's case, the trigger messages are not entirely asynchronous, as with systemd, but they may as well be, since the Mac ports being used most frequently do not have peer information available, and are (effectively) just integers.
This leads to what I call the "on behalf of" problem.
Something starts running. And you want to know *why*. Clearly, it;s running because someone requested one or more of the services it provides -- but there's no way to know who it is running "on behalf of" to provide that service.
Say, however, you figure out that service 'C' is running "on behalf of" service 'M'.
Who is service 'M' running "on behalf of"?
In Mac OS X, it's *almost* possible to get the information as to where every thread in everything is pending a response from something else in its stack. But it's not possible to figure out the entity relationship, because you can't trace the other end of a connection.
So I can perhaps figure out that an application is pinwheeling -- that's the cursor that the display server puts up on a Mac OS X application when it's not responding to "are you alive?" chatter from the display server within it's main app loop. It happens when someone does a blocking operation in the main app loop, instead of packaging up the operation that might block, and giving it to a thread delegate instead: it means someone made a coding error, because they expected an operation to never block ...and then it blocked.
So I actually want to see where it's blocked (which I can) and see who it's trying to get work from, that's not responding to the work request -- which I can't, because I can't see "the service on the other end".
Both launchd/Mach ports, and systemd suffer from this problem.
But if I were permitted to ask the question... then I could find the next entity in the chain... and I could ask "what are you waiting on?", and follow the chain down to the actual problem.
Automatically.
The display server puts up the pinwheel, I option-click it (or whatever), and a dialog pops up and says:
MagicDraw is hung waiting for RemoteFilerPro, ...which would be frigging useful. Because then I could say to myself "Oh. The VPN is down because the Wi-Fi is out. Better reset the router again."
which is hung waiting for access to "remote_filter_cache_file.ca",
which is hung in the kernel on a permissions check,
which is hung, waiting on DirectoryServices,
which is hung, waiting on mDNSResponder,
which is hung waiting on a network response from "VPN.bob.net",
which is hung waiting on a response from network interface "Wi-Fi2"
But I can't do that.
Although no official statements (to the best of my knowledge) to the effect that Slackware will never have systemd have been made, it's a pretty safe bet that if Slackware ever does start using systemd, Bob will be leaving Slackware and forking it into another systemd-free distro so fast that I expect nobody else will be able to tell which was the cause and which was the effect.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
And that constitutes a "Power Grab" how, exactly?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
You're not alone. Most Linux users are entirely happy with systemd.
yay gentoo! Its very easy to avoid that systemd garbage. I'm not just bandwagoning here, I have to setup RHEL7 for a very large company because they wanted to stay with RedHat. It was hell on wheels. RHEL7.1 was a slight improvement but still not enough to ever consider it again.
I would kill for a systemd-free rebuild of RHEL, but it doesn't seem like there's enough of a push to be able to make it happen with some sort of plausible enterprise ability. It wouldn't be that hard -- basically take RHEL7 and stick RHEL6's initscripts and startup system onto it -- but it wouldn't be "EL7", which is important.
A systemd-free version of Fedora is tricker, if only because LP and friends have succeeded in burning as many bridges as possible within the base install away from any other init paradigm. Good job, guys. I hope you rot.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Beyond the top 5-10, how popular are all those projects?
Better question: "What the hell does that have to do with anything?". In fact the lack of popularity just proves that for the vast majority of people systemd is a complete non issue.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Yep dtrace, jails, high uptime, and ZFS oh and init have no appeal at all!
http://saveie6.com/
It's one of those things that doesn't matter to the average user until it's too big to not matter, and even then it still doesn't matter because the average user doesn't develop the software that s/he runs. The total environment just gets a little more controlled and the applications coming out just are a little more centrally directed, and Red Hat becomes the new Microsoft.
Debian never gave guarantees for anything but their default init. That has always been like that, it is just the init that changed. How could a responsible distribution make claims that init systems it never made am effort to test is supported?
I think users are mostly happy (or blissfully ignorant about init systems) with systemd. If they were not, then users would storm devuan. That distribution has seen lots of press when it started, so people did know about what is happening there, yet interest does seem slow.
I also think that maintainers would not have gone for systemd if they did not think it had benefits for their users. Contrary to what you think maintainers do care for having people use their distribution. The fact that systemd had convinced developers did also factor into the maintainers decisions. So did advantages for the packagers: Getting rid of init scripts was a big part of that. There were lots of factors considered at Debian, check the CTTE discussion you liked to earlier for more.
I do not think it matters whether software depends on an init system. Software depends on other software all the time and will adapt once some better option comes along.
Actually I find it reassuring that things start to depend on systemd: It means that it is reasonably simple to interact with the system and that it provides something worth the effort to talk to it. Never seen that before on Linux.
Regards, Tobias
You really don't realize how much of an uninformed douchebag you are to compare Red Hat to Microsoft, do you?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
For example you now have hugely complex systems just to make sure your soundcard will only be usable by users logged in locally.
Ironically, trying to work around that to allow a system daemon to use sound was one of the first things that pissed me off against the new session-based model, and in a separate incident, working around the awful stuff that has been done to audio by pulseaudio's session-based mixer management started to sour my stomach on just about anything LP has touched (well OK, prior to all that I did initially get mildly pissed until avahi finally became optional in Debian.) Now I find myself occasionally delayed dealing with systemd crap that would never have been a problem under the previous system.
It's just funny that example was chosen.
Someone had to do it.
You see the fact that it makes things easy to use is a problem for some Linux people, who seem to think Linux needs to be difficult and complex to use. In many ways the old way of doing init was backwards , you are right the declarative style of systemd is far more intuitive and with less wheel reinventing.
And in a nutshell, that is the problem. The other problem is that systemd really has some bad design-decision in there, because its creators lack experience and insight. The same is true in spades for Windows, but that does not make it fine in Linux.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It does either one. You are not locked in the way you think you are. Your distribution choose to use that feature. It isn't mandatory.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
You should probably take a hint from the competent. All the great distributions are using systemd according to you. Maybe you should take that as a clue?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Thats a distro issue so have a go at them if its not to your liking. If the wheel was not reinvented and improved, i'd be stuck with Wordstar on DOS. pulseaudio works fine and has done for a while, sometimes you end up going backwards a few steps to eventually go forward.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I ran Slackware for years, and tried Red Hat at 4.3. It was fairly good. Then they released 5.0. I started using NetBSD shortly thereafter and really haven't looked back. Slackware is a good way to learn enough unix to bootstrap up into a BSD.
I don't hate Red Hat, nor do I hate Microsoft. They are both companies, with a product or two they sell.
I first ran Linux on a computer in my apartment in 1994. A '486 with a 300MB ESDI drive.