The new version of Devuan 4.0 "Chimaera" has just been released . This is a fork of Debian GNU/Linux that does not include systemd. The new branch features a change to the Debian 11 "Bullseye" package base. Mountable ISO images for live installation are available for download for AMD64, i386, armel, armhf, arm64, and ppc64el architectures.
The project has forked around 400 Debian packages that have been modified to remove systemd links, change names, or adapt to the Devuan infrastructure.
Two packages (devuan-baseconf, jenkins-debian-glue-buildenv-devuan) are unique to Devuan and are related to repository configuration and the execution of the build system . Otherwise, Devuan is fully compatible with Debian and can be used as a base for custom Debian builds without systemd. Devuan-specific packages can be downloaded from the packages.devuan.org repository.
The default desktop environment is based on Xfce and the Slim display manager. KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, LXQt, and LXDE are available as optional desktop environments. Instead of systemd, the classic init system SysVinit is provided, along with the optional openrc and runit systems.
D-Bus-free capability is provided, allowing you to create minimalist desktop configurations based on blackbox, fluxbox, fvwm, fvwm-crystal, and openbox window managers.
To configure the network, the NetworkManager configurator option is provided, which is not tied to systemd. Instead of systemd-udev, use eudev, a fork of udev from the Gentoo project. Consolekit is used to manage user sessions in Xfce and MATE while the rest of the desktops use elogind, a variant of logind that is not tied to systemd.
Main novelties of Devuan 4.0 «Chimaera»
In this new version of the system, the migration to the Debian 11 package base has been carried out , so the packages are synchronized with Debian 11.1 and above all the heart of the system is moved to the Linux 5.10 kernel, in addition, the user is now able to choose to use the sysvinit, runit and OpenRC init systems.
On the other hand, a new skin was added for both the login screen, the login manager and the desktop, in addition to adding support for gdm3 and sddm screen managers, in addition to Slim.
It is also noted that the ability to use without systemd all user environments available in Debian was provided.
And for the visually impaired, a voice-guided installation process has been provided and support for braille displays has been added.
Also, in this new version of the distribution, support for the LXDE desktop environment was added.
Finally, if you want to know more about it , you can check the details at the following link.
Download Devuan 4.0 «Chimaera»
If you want to download this Linux distribution, you should go to its official website and in the downloads section you can get the system image from one of its available mirrors. It's best to use the one closest to you; the link is here.
How to upgrade to Devuan 4.0 "Chimaera" from Devuan 3.x?
If you have Devuan version 3.x installed, you can upgrade to the new stable version without having to reinstall the system.
To do this, you need to open a terminal and run the following commands . First, we'll add the Devuan 3.0 repositories to our sources.list file, which is located at: /etc/apt/sources.list
We edit it with our preferred editor and add these repositories (it is important to comment any other repository with a # at the beginning or remove it to avoid problems in the update):
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged chimaera main
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged chimaera-updates main
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged chimaera-security main
#deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged chimaera-backports main
We save the changes and kill the xscreensaver process to be able to update correctly:
killall xscreensaver
On the terminal we execute an update:
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
Here we will have to wait since it will begin to download all the packages and configurations necessary for the update. This process will be delayed, so in which terminal the process can be used to perform some other task in which your computer's system is updated.
At the end you will need to restart your computer for all the changes to take effect , and when you restart it you should see that you already have the new version of Devuan installed.
In case of package failures, the failed packages must be corrected and then the update must be started again.
apt-get -f install
apt-get dist-upgrade