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Devuan Jessie 1.0 Officially Released (softpedia.com)

prisoninmate quotes a report from Softpedia: Announced for the first time back in November 2014, Devuan is a Debian fork that doesn't use systemd as init system. It took more than two and a half years for it to reach 1.0 milestone, but the wait is now over and Devuan 1.0.0 stable release is here. Based on the packages and software repositories of the Debian GNU/Linux 8 "Jessie" operating system, Devuan 1.0.0 "Jessie" is now considered the first stable version of the GNU/Linux distribution, which stays true to its vision of developing a free Debian OS without systemd. This release is recommended for production use. As Devuan 1.0.0 doesn't ship with systemd, several adjustments needed to be made. For example, the distro uses a systemd-free version of the NetworkManager network connection manager and includes several extra libsystemd0-free packages in its repository.

10 of 237 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Who cares? by Etcetera · · Score: 5, Informative

    How does this affect anyone? Linux has 2% market share. That tiny percentage is dominated by Ubuntu and Red Hat. Why does anyone care about this distribution? Nobody will use it. It is inconsequential and isn't news at all.

    Developers use Ubuntu; server admins use Debian. And server admins who consider systemd to be a destabilizing atrocity that chucks reliability out the window in favor of GNOME edge cases now have an option.

    What I'd really love is a Fedora fork (or EL clone, such as Scientific Linux) that reverts to the EL6 initscript build-out and considers systemd as just another option to be used on top of a standard SysV base -- much like xinetd. There if you need it, but not affecting the core.

  2. kudos to Devuan by FudRucker · · Score: 5, Informative

    but i already have slackware14.2 fixed up nice the way i like it, and i am not wiping all that off to try out a 1.0 release, but still i have to say kudos to Devuan because i am one of those hardcoded systemD haters http://without-systemd.org/wik...

    --
    Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
  3. Re:Who cares? by kwerle · · Score: 4, Informative

    How does this affect anyone? Linux has 2% market share. That tiny percentage is dominated by Ubuntu and Red Hat. Why does anyone care about this distribution? Nobody will use it. It is inconsequential and isn't news at all.

    While I agree with your general sentiment, I think your counting is off. I think there are a few non-desktop systems that run linux, so that 2% number may be a little low.

  4. systemd recursively obliterates parent dirs, root, by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 5, Informative

    and OS instead of children: R! /path/to/remove/.*

    https://github.com/systemd/sys...

    Pottering's Response:

    I am not sure I'd consider this much of a problem. Yeah, it's a UNIX pitfall, but "rm -rf /foo/.*" will work the exact same way, no?

    Unrelated, I also found sound worked much easier in FreeBSD than it did in Linux with pulseaudio. I wonder who designed that trash.

  5. Re:Who cares? by deek · · Score: 4, Informative

    Perfectly legitimate question. As a sysadmin myself, only problem I've had with systemd is when I upgraded one system. It had an entry in the /etc/fstab file for a removable USB drive. I had to append "nofail" to the options for that entry, to ensure the system booted properly.

    Otherwise, it's been smooth sailing. From a practical perspective, systemd works fine.

    Someone with mod points and a liking for sceptical attitudes will soon ensure you're modded up again.

  6. Re:Who cares? by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Informative

    You got a collective shrug because the problem was with mdadm not reporting the UUID correctly early in the boot process and not with systemd itself. This was fixed last year in mdadm 3.4.4 and if you search on the topic you won't find a problem of booting degraded affecting current releases of Debian, Ubuntu or CentOS, unless your mdadm config specifically says to not boot degraded.

    The thing people are complaining about is precisely what lead to this problem in the first place. Everyone complains about the monoculture of systemd, but the monoculture of sysvinit not being effected by some design bugs in other software is what is causing a lot of this other software to fail due to undocumented or unexpected behaviour. Then people misattribute it to systemd and complain when systemd developers don't bend over backwards to accommodate bugs in other people's software.

  7. Re:Who cares? I do by MrKaos · · Score: 2, Informative

    What are these server admins doing?

    I can't speak for them, however in our use cases we use initd to control server processes where we want control over the application latency, generally using CPU isolation and affinity. We built a test lab to understand how systemd would interact with our application and so we could learn it well ahead of our clients attempting deployment. This is a quality mindset used in ISO environments that prevents downtime.

    For some inexplicable reason a lot of people seem to think that if you want to use initd you don't know anything about systemd which I find to be a poor understanding of the sheer variety of use cases and perhaps a little condescending.

    My reasoning for using initd is specific and based on our test cases. Some of those reasons (off the top of my head) initd isn't a large monolithic process that generates a lot of software interrupts, we don't want a process manager to manage an event system we don't need, unit files are soft replacement for not knowing how to shell script properly, journalctl and binary logging poses a threat to uptime and timely root cause analysis, initd doesn't presume a large base of (potentially redundant) knowledge of the properties required to control it.

    Sure there are some good points about systemd and some valid criticisms of initd (particularly the way the rc scripts are used) however all that speaks to is that it is initd needs a matching event management system that controls and is controlled by initd. systemd tries to be that and a process management system.

    I have the defaults on EL7 and Debian 8 and all I notice is the VM's come up much faster and with fewer race conditions than under previous inits.

    That's great, however systemd has no effect on application processes that take time to start. These are easily parallelizable by using initd's existing inittab file so it doesn't impact boot.

    This in practical terms means the difference between going home and doing an all nighter.

    --
    My ism, it's full of beliefs.
  8. Re:systemd recursively obliterates parent dirs, ro by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sound on Linux in the late 1990s didn't really "just work". If you were lucky, you could get one application (and only one) to send audio to your audio card. The situation was so bad that many people used ESD, a quick and dirty hack from the Enlightenment people with horrible latency, to try to get something approximating to manageable sound on the GNU/Linux desktop.

    The reason you probably think sound "worked" during the late 1990s was that it was considered a small miracle if sound worked at all, given the lack of drivers, and most people were happy if they reached the point that they got anything to work. Back then it wouldn't matter if running your MP3 player meant no notification noises, because the chances are the latter weren't important (and could be resolved with ESD anyway), and the MP3 player being capable of playing MP3s was "good enough". This problem ran right into the early 2000s.

    It was once the drivers started to work, ALSA reached critical mass, etc, that the shortcomings of having the kernel manage audio as a single device started to really show up.

    PulseAudio has a bad reputation not because it isn't necessary, but because early versions (1) had problems, (2) clashed with mountains of hacks that everyone else had installed to get around the problems kernel audio, and (3) the developer had a reputation for being a little bit prickly.

    If PA wasn't necessary, then given 1-3, do you really think all significant GNU/Linux distributions would have adopted it?

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  9. Re:Who cares? by squiggleslash · · Score: 1, Informative

    I don't think many of the people complaining about systemd are "crusty old sys admins", I think we're talking about mostly hobbyists who don't like change. SysV init has never been considered a thing of beauty by those who have to maintain GNU/Linux (or any *ix) systems. That's why systemd is the latest in a long line of replacements, from Apple's LaunchD (also about to be used in FreeBSD) to Ubuntu's Upstart.

    And much of hate seems to be the developer rather than anything to do with the program itself. Upstart never got this amount of hate, and many claim, probably trollishly, that they switched to FreeBSD, which is in the process of upgrading from the simpler and less flexible BSD Init and has never, to the best of my knowledge, run sysvinit.

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  10. Re: I thought this died in the wind by gmack · · Score: 3, Informative

    You would look in the syslog file you configured bind messages to go to. Or with that many domains, you would run a config test on all zone file before you reload the config. I don't have that many domains configured and I have scripts that alert me to config errors as well as scripts that alert me to domains that are no longer pointing at my server.

    Feel free to use my email address to contact me if you need to improve your hosting environment.