Distribution - Debian to Devuan Migration

   
   
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Migrate

Migrate Devuan, and go further, Prevent libsystemd0 to be Installed.

I have migrate from Debian Stretch (systemd) to Devuan Ascii (sysvinit). Yes, I’m officialy a Devuan user, finally.

Devuan Mirror

I followed the guidance.

Devuan Keyring

There were issue, but solved.

  • NetworkManager is gone, but I can use wicd+dhcpcd

The rest works as a charm.

Screenshot

OS: Devuan

  • Window Manager: HerbstluftWM

  • Panel: Dzen2

Devuan Screenshot

Consider Going Further

Then, I decided to go further, remove libsystemd0 and prevent it to be installed.

$ cat /etc/apt/preferences.d/libsystemd0 
Package: libsystemd0
Pin: release *
Pin-Priority: -1

I do not think libsystemd0 is a dummy package. I just need to know, How bad this could be, prevent libsystemd0 to be installed.

Result

  • Work well: Libreoffice, Inkscape and Chromium.

  • Lost: SDDM, GIMP, CUPS, SAMBA, Firefox.

It is good to know how bad each dependencies are. Please click for more complete investigation using uncropped figure.

Devuan Keyring

Note that Devuan works well if you keep libsystemd0.

Checking GRUB

Debian is somewhat interesting that Debian allow user to choose different init at boot. A Debian system can be installed with two different init, although you can only have one init running at a time. Debian configure this kernel parameter in GRUB2.

init=/lib/sysvinit/init

Or maybe

init=/lib/systemd/systemd
Now, I know.

This kernel parameter that handle init, used to be a mystery to me. Now, nomore secret.

Devuan

Here is what I found in Devuan.

menuentry 'Debian GNU/Linux, with Linux 4.9.0-3-amd64' ... {
	...
	echo	'Loading Linux 4.9.0-3-amd64 ...'
	linux	/boot/vmlinuz-4.9.0-3-amd64 root=/dev/sda10 ro  init=/lib/systemd/systemd
	echo	'Loading initial ramdisk ...'
	initrd	/boot/initrd.img-4.9.0-3-amd64
}

Debian

Here is what I found in Debian.

menuentry 'Debian GNU/Linux, with Linux 4.9.0-3-amd64' ... {
	...
	echo	'Loading Linux 4.9.0-3-amd64 ...'
	linux	/boot/vmlinuz-4.9.0-3-amd64 root=/dev/sda7 ro  init=/lib/sysvinit/init
	echo	'Loading initial ramdisk ...'
	initrd	/boot/initrd.img-4.9.0-3-amd64
}

Other Issues

I haven’t got time to have deeper exploration on Devuan yet. There are some issues such as slim that has no reboot option. Maybe next time.

Thank you for reading