Systemd-Free Devuan 2.0 'ASCII' Officially Released (devuan.org)

"Dear Init Freedom Lovers..." begins the announcement at Devuan.org: We are happy to announce that Devuan GNU+Linux 2.0 ASCII Stable is finally available. Devuan is a GNU+Linux distribution committed to providing a universal, stable, dependable, free software operating system that uses and promotes alternatives to systemd and its components.

Devuan 2.0 ASCII runs on several architectures. Installer CD and DVD ISOs, as well as desktop-live and minimal-live ISOs, are available for i386 and amd64. Ready-to-use images can be downloaded for a number of ARM platforms and SOCs, including Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, OrangePi, BananaPi, OLinuXino, Cubieboard, Nokia and Motorola mobile phones, and several Chromebooks, as well as for Virtualbox/QEMU/Vagrant. The Devuan 2.0 ASCII installer ISOs offer a variety of Desktop Environments including Xfce, KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, LXQt, with others available post-install. The expert install mode now offers a choice of either SysVinit or OpenRC as init system...

We would like to thank the entire Devuan community for the continued support, feedback, and collaboration....
The release notes include information on Devuan's new network of package repository mirrors, and they're also touting their "direct and easy upgrade paths" from Devuan Jessie, Debian Jessie and Debian Stretch.

Comments

This distro

[93 Escort Wagon]

... is a Poettering-Free Zone!

Re:No one cares

[greenwow]

Except for losing log messages and not providing a proper exit status. It's really hard to troubleshoot problems without log messages.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Bruce Perens]

I've had my own ideas about how to "better" engineer Devuan, but there are so many things to do and so little Bruce. :-)

With respect, I think your argument is mooted by the fact that Debian itself exists and is a viable alternative if you want to load SystemD. However, it is entirely possible for you to create what you believe is missing in Devuan, and provide it. You can ignore the fact that such a thing would be more for a ritual definition of universality than for anyone to practically use it - since you have stated your own belief that fulfilling that definition is important.

Thanks

Bruce

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[lkcl]

Thanks for the bit on mother Theresa. You seem to have your brains together so can you explain what the problems with ststemd are?

caveat: my brain is known to be made of mush, sometimes. as in, some form of dyslexia / delay means i get basic boolean logic wrong, ok? :)

* the first clue is this: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/... which contains 27 separate and distinct entries, three of them for this year alone. by contrast try searching for "sysvinit" and you get *ONE* entry dating back to 1999. you'd need to start searching for "bash" and start doing a bit more investigation (a bash search refers to several variants) to get a proper comparison.

* the systemd team have been known to ignore bugreports, closing them arbitrarily. not just once but repeatedly. i've seen posts made by people on here which gave references. basically they don't listen to constructive feedback.

* the scope creep on systemd is very insidious and dangerous. there's no consultation about the impact of the changes being made: they're just blithely "handed out" and if you don't like it go fuck yourself is the general attitude. management of firewall rules, fstab, networking, process control: all these things are completely insane to be managed exclusively by PID 1. one mistake and your entire system is compromised (or falls over).

so basically it's down to abdication of responsibility of developers and users to a team that has repeatedly demonstrated a total lack of willingness to recognise and take seriously the responsibility of their role... or more to the point that the distro maintainers *CHOSE WITHOUT CONSULTATION* to forcibly abdicate responsibility on BEHALF of users, the maintenance and running of their system to systemd's developers. if you are not familiar with what happened with the debian "vote": systemd was the absolute worst and least-favoured choice by far and above... and absolutely no explanation as to why that vote was completely and utterly ignored has ever been given.

there are many many articles and examples of why systemd is an extremely dangerous *technical* choice, but mainly it's down to the fact that the users haven't been given any choice - right across the board - due to all major GNU/Linux distros swapping over all at the same time like a flock of birds / shoal of fish. try doing "apt-get --purge remove libsystemd1" and see what happens (or equivalent on fedora, or archlinux). that there *is* no choice is in itself a dangerous precedent (a monoculture).

basically it's really hard to describe.

Re: No one cares

[Bing Tsher E]

"You're not paying for this racoon we are setting loose in your kitchen, so you have no place to make demands of someone who is giving you a raccoon for free."

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re: No one cares

[F.Ultra]

Neither claim which is true. No logs have ever been dropped by systemd and the exit on failure is because the daemon fails after systemd did it's thing and people not fully understanding how asynchronous starting works.

Re: No one cares

[F.Ultra]

But there is no evidence, just anonymous anecdotes from people who claim to have switched to BSD for ages ago but still seam to comment on every Linux article they find.

Re:No one cares

[F.Ultra]

They are talking about "systemctl start XXX" returning 0 when XXX fails to start. This is always due to XXX failing after it forks so systemctl does not see the failure before it has already done it's thing.

Lot's of the older sysv init scripts contains lots of pre-flight tests on daemons where the script writes knew that the daemon would fork first and look for configuration files etc later and then when the unit files where created these pre-flight checks where removed (but there is nothing that prevents a unit file from having pre-flight checks) by maintainers that didn't fully understand why these checks where there.

Re: Imagine this

[F.Ultra]

Since you pay a fixed price for the Red Hat support (with their subscription model). Wouldn't it be in RH:s best interest to keep the number of calls down in order to keep the profits up? Now if they would have charged per case then it would have been a completely different situation but they don't.

Re: No one cares

[drinkypoo]

"How do I know there is nothing better? All the major distros have adopted systemd. If there was a better alternative I'm sure they would adopt it."

Bollocks. They adopted it because it became a dependency of other software, because the devs of that software were lazy and/or incompetent, like gnome. All except redhat of course which did it deliberately to the rest of us.

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

and absolutely no explanation as to why that vote was completely and utterly ignored has ever been given.

After it became quite obvious that the NSA's selinux project was a little too obvious a vector for backdoors, an alternative method for introducing opaque, complex, unneeded, and bug riddled code as close to the kernel as possible was needed. Systemd is not so much a technical product as it is a social engineering one.

Re:No one cares

[emacs_abuser]

Agree completely.

I've been using a systemd system for years now. Not one problem related to systemd. Unless you call fast start up and shut down a problem. The old init scripts were a mess, each one slightly different with no easy way to tell what commands each one would accept, and no way to get something simple, like the human readable purpose of the script. Systemd is a big improvement, for some reason rejected by people that somehow feel empowered because they can hack startup/shutdown scripts.

Re: No one cares

[phantomfive]

The Unix philosophy is not "each piece does one thing." It's complex and you should understand it.

If I were designing it, the init system and the hot swapping system would completely separate, but the init system would call into the hot swapping system through a minimal interface when needed. That would give you maximal flexibility.