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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.
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.
I'm waiting for Devuan EBCDIC personally.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I was the second Debian project leader. These days, I prefer to run Devuan, a true Debian derivative engineered the way I would probably have decided to make it. It's efficient and trouble-free. Thanks to the Devuan developers for all of the work!
Bruce Perens.
... is a Poettering-Free Zone!
#DeleteChrome
Except for losing log messages and not providing a proper exit status. It's really hard to troubleshoot problems without log messages.
Log message problems can be fixed (maybe by a different team, though), if that were the worst thing, it wouldn't be a problem. The problem is systemd is crappy architecture, and you don't want to build stuff on top of crappy architecture to get it embedded deeply within the system, you want to keep it flexible and replaceable. That's why this project is good even if you never use it, because it will improve the quality of the software you do use. And those people who do like systemd can use it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Funny how people who support systemd are either blind or run a full memory purge after reading any story about systemd on /.. Good examples are all over the comments on /.. If you didn't see them, you're either new here or you pointedly missed them.
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
Bruce Perens.
Funny how so many people claim systemd is a lousy architecture to build upon, yet never provide any evidence to support those claims
Nah, I did a fairly long analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of systemd in my journal. If you disagree, go ahead and tell me: it will increase my knowledge.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Listing of grievances about systemd.
Feats of speed.
OS miracles.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
"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."
Devuan isn't Gentoo. It's supposed to be a collection of binary packages with good dependency management. Systemd is by design a poor fit for any such collection that offers an option other than systemd. That's why if you decide to install a Debian Jessie system with SysV init, you have no choice but to install some pieces of systemd as well.
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.
apologies i missed this the first time, however it's probably best done as a separate response anyway. so it goes like this:
1. i have used debian since 1996, since phil hands donated me a 486SX25 laptop so that i could work on samba 1.9.16 and beyond, on the move. its flexibility and reach means i will not use anything else.
2. systemd is so bad - the developers so psychologically damaged - that i will not use it. i will not even tolerate libsystemd1 being on systems that i manage, so it has to go (entirely).
3. devuan *would* be ok... but the same analysis-mind-set that says "libsystemd1 has to go" *also* has me looking at the conflict in devuan's mission statement, and i won't use it because they are *AGAINST* systemd... it's the other side of exactly the same coin.
4. with the sheer overwhelming volume of packages, files and so on from debian that i have (dating back nearly 10 years) "upgrading" to devuan, or dropping debian and going with FreeBSD, or anything basically *other* than "sticking with debian" is simply not possible. period. some of my systems are still "apparently" on debian 7.0 except they're not: they've just been on debian/testing all that time and continuously upgraded as necessary... and i do NOT mean "apt-get dist-upgrade"d.
5. so i am stuck between a rock and a hard place.... and THANK GOD... angband.pl exists. it contains recompiled MODERN (maintained) debian packages, modifying them to have "--without-systemd" in the necessary xorg, pulseaudio, samba, udev, cups and dozens of other packages... and also *REINTRODUCES* console-kit, polkit, udisks2 and many many other packages that were REMOVED (foolishly) from debian as "no longer necessary".
the situation is so stark that i even at one point actually removed libsystemd0 (and udev) from a live-running debian system. i had to use /sbin/MAKEDEV from /etc/rc.local to do it. it was... awful. but, i got what i wanted. then, thank god, i heard about angband.pl. https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
bottom line is: debian is fine (as long as you want debian *and* systemd). devuan is fine (as long as you want debian-like and *don't* want systemd). however that leaves absolutely no room for people who do not want debian with systemd, who cannot (for whatever reason) install or convert to devuan.
https://ewontfix.com/14/ is a good article which goes into detail about why systemd is a bad architecture.
Actually, no.
SystemD is controlled primarily by Redhat employees -- and, they are very, very, very hostile to commits that aren't 100% behind their 'everything is a VM' goalposts. Even normal, sane bugs results in an almost instant screaming response, and closed bugs.
And fork? Pffft. That's what you're against, right? So, one can either fork systemd and 'do it right', or... not use it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The same is true in devuan.
Devuan ASCII even rolled back on the removal of the libsystemd dependency that it started to removed in Jessie. Now the packages that were only changed to not depend on libsystemd are again taken straight from debian and include that again.
Devuan ASCII also ships with elogind, which provides the same APIs that systemd-logind provides on debian and undid all the changes that were in devuan jessie that removed the dependency on those APIs. They even celebrate that "archivement" in the devuan release notes!
Devuan ASCII is much closer to debian than devuan jessie was. The only non-trivial diff at this point is the branding and that they block the systemd deb (but none of the rest build from the same sources) from their distribution.
I do not understand why devuan is even hailed as systemd-free at this point. With jessie they at least tried to remove systemd tentacles, but they have given up on that entirely in ASCII.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You like it so much, you won't publicly associate your pseudonym to liking systemd.
> While it comes with some problems of its own it, does solve real problems and is an improvement.
Really? "Real" problems in a systems event reporter that has worked near flawlessly since its inception, over twenty years ago? What might those have been?
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
"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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
ls -lh /lib/systemd/systemd /lib/systemd/systemd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1.6M Feb 1 23:31
It's clearly not a lithe, slender little thing running as pid 1.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Perhaps you have an alternative explanation, if so I would like to hear it.
Yeah, I do, I discussed it at length in my journal, with this particular entry being the core. Lennart Poettering spent a lot of time working with distro builders and figuring out what would make things easier for them. So that one use case it does well, and I commend it for that.
And I would say there are other use cases it does well, but that is the most important one. Why am I against it? Again I discussed it at length, but the short answer I will restate from above: when pieces of the system become too entwined, that's bad architecture.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Wait, they used start-stop-daemon in a unit file, WTF?
I don't remember anyone forcing me to use a systemd distro.
Then I guess you do not work where I work
But with that said, to me systemd has been a big meh. Had no issues with it nor does it excite me. At home I run Slackware and I find a bit faster and easier to deal with than what I use at work and personally, prefer it over other distros.
BTW my work hardware is more beefed-up than I have at home, but none of the performance has to do with systemd but with background tasks I need to have running at work.
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.
We hope the inclusion of OpenRC in ASCII's installer (expert mode) can be a concrete answer to your question. OpenRC is also what good BSD folks are adopting.
I've heard that claim made before too... Are we really in a situation where a combination of laziness and conspiracy has forced most distros on to systemd, yet there is apparently enough support to build a fork of Debian without it?
All the available evidence says yes on all counts.
Wouldn't it make more sense to, say, fix Gnome and a few other key bits of software to work without systemd, thus freeing all these distros that were forced to adopt it? Or just move to other window managers?
Yes, yes it would. But that's not the course that was taken. Debian went to systemd with a slim majority vote, but people act like it was a unanimous decision and foregone conclusion. Well, it was neither.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Neither claim which is true. No logs have ever been dropped by systemd
Many people who have tried to troubleshoot early boot issues (mostly with RAID) disagree with you, including myself.
and the exit on failure is because the daemon fails after systemd did it's thing
*its
and people not fully understanding how asynchronous starting works.
Too bad they had to make it so complicated to understand. It just worked before.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wait, they used start-stop-daemon in a unit file, WTF?
I have seen a lot of this. Developers who have an existing package under upstart, and saw the switch to systemd, wanted to be ready, so they "wrapped" their upstart script in a systemd unit file, and pretended it was all good. The practical result is that the package works fine under normal conditions, but any failure turns into a complete undiagnosable mess because the developer didn't take the time to understand what systemd is or how it works.
systemd does have one fundamental flaw, and it is the only truly real one it ever had: The documentation sucks ass. The one thing it really needs is a how-to instruction on porting from an upstart service to a systemd service, written by someone who actually knows how to do it properly instead of the droves of rank amateurs out there who "got something working" and are just documenting their own screwed up attempt. RedHat has a few examples, but they are geared to RedHat, and most were written in the last year or so, which did absolutely no good for the people who needed this 2+ years ago.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
SystemD is controlled primarily by Redhat employees -- and, they are very, very, very hostile to commits that aren't 100% behind their 'everything is a VM' goalposts. Even normal, sane bugs results in an almost instant screaming response, and closed bugs.
I'm not saying bullshit, but I think links are appropriate given the accusation you just made.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Let me ask you this?
Do you use Linux professionally as a programmer/user or as a system administrator?
It seems the later who switched to FreeBSD and Duvuan for good reason have a complex environment with hundreds of racks and virtual machines where a reboot means things like your array or SAN don't get mounted and daemons randomly get shut down with no logs on why seem common. I could be wrong but systemD is great on a laptop for faster boots but professionally sounds like a nightmare when the CIO is breathing down your neck for uptime and your servers are being stupid
http://saveie6.com/
It's great to see a systemd-free distro making progress. Hope they keep releasing.
And remember, Slackware is the oldest GNU/Linux distro in active maintenance, and is also free of systemd. Even the development version (Slackware-current) has no systemd.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
Fast, stable, flexible, and systemd free.
Like old (real) Debian, it has excellent package management.
Other distros get more bloated, less flexible, and more authoritarian; Devaun embraces the true ideals of Linux, and UNIX.
On the other hand, most of the rest of us are home-gamers or small busineeses, not RH's customers (most of us use Debian...) and almost any customization of services you want started at boot gets broken by a new rev of systemd. And the workarounds on the 'net - are usually for earlier systemd revs and no longer work. Just taking a raspberry pi upgrade kills half your stuff and days are wasted finding out why mounting a share doesn't work, nginx won't start, mysql can't find its database, custom message passing fails due to wrong startup order, and few of us have hours per WEEK to screw around learning yet another, more complex way of doing what used to work fine and are tired of seeing arrogant responses like "then don't do that - WONTFIX".
It's at least as "exciting" if you have half a dozen PCs you want to have doing customized work and talking to one another depending on which is on at the time.
TL;DR
Red Hat has no reason to give a shit. They sell support contracts they'd sell anyway due to MBAs, and for a jillion instances in a cloud, one fix does all.
For my case, you'd need several per machine, and RH doesn't support debian/Mint/etc even if I wanted to pay them.
This is based on actual events on my homestead, I'm not gassing about imaginaries.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Is this the OS equivalent of Godwins law?
But mounting root at that stage is not the work of any init so if I have to guess the problem that you experienced with the degraded btrfs has to do with the initramfs image on your distribution and not with systemd, but having not seen this myself I will of course not say that systemd had nothing to do with it but it sounds odd since / is mounted before init is called by the booting kernel. And I've read many storied about default initramfs:s having trouble with degraded raid1 btrfs so I think you blamed systemd too early there.
Gnome are not vendor locked-in, their dependency upon logind is #1 something that can be disabled with a compile-flag and #2 the dependency is on the logind DBUS namespace and thus anyone can implement something that speaks that namespace (which is how the BSDs implemented it on their end). And the logind thing solves a problem for Gnome which is why they choose to go with it.
In the long term, that's bad for Linux. There's no reason that everything systemd does couldn't have been done the Unix way with smaller interchangeable tools that could inter-operate.
Which accidentally is just how the various systemd are implemented, it's a bunch of smaller interchangeable applications that inter-operate via DBUS. The only dependecy each tool have is the DBUS namespace so as long as you implement that you can change each and every systemd tool.
There are still systemd-free distros out there, support them if you care. I'm happy with the above.
ERROR 144 - REBOOT ?
http://big-elephants.com/2013-...
How is this a mess ? This can only be a mess if you have no idea what you're doing, in which case you shouldn't be commenting, worrying or thinking about Systemd or "old init scripts".
Unfortunately "they" decided to impose this massive pile of crap that does everything now ( opposite of what UNIX should be - and because of what UNIX is is why we use it... otherwise everybody would be running Windows on their servers ).
But it's politics. Redhat is doing it because of Political reasons. Sneaky and crappy... it's something Microsoft would do.
But mounting root at that stage is not the work of any init so if I have to guess the problem that you experienced with the degraded btrfs has to do with the initramfs image on your distribution and not with systemd,
It does not matter even slightly whether systemd caused the problem if it exacerbates the problem.
but having not seen this myself I will
...ramble anyway, about things you don't know about.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"