Devuan 3.0 Beowulf arrives with Debian 10.4 base, Kernel 4.19 and more

The launch of the new version of the Linux distribution "Devuan 3.0 Beowulf" which is a fork of Debian, but characterized by not having systemd.

The new branch is notable for the transition to the base of the Debian 10 "Buster" package, besides that as part of the project, versions of approximately 400 Debian packages were created and modified to get rid of system bindings, rebrand or adaptation to Devuan infrastructure features.

Two packages (devuan-baseconf, jenkins-debian-glue-buildenv-devuan) are present only in Devuan and are related to the configuration of the repositories and the operation of the build system. Otherwise, Devuan is fully compatible with Debian and can be used as the basis for building specialized Debian builds without systemd.

The default desktop is based on the Xfce and Slim display manager, although there is also optional for the installation of KDE, MATE, Cinnamon and LXQt.

Instead of systemd, the classic SysVinit initialization system is supplied. An optional is mode of operation without D-Bus provided, which allows the creation of minimal desktop configurations based on the black box, fluxbox, FVWM, FVWM-crystal and Openbox managers.

To configure the network, a NetworkManager configurator option is proposed that is not tied to systemd. To manage user sessions in KDE, Cinnamon and LXQt offered elogind, option logind, not tied to systemd. Use of Xfce and MATEconsolekit.

What's new in Devuan 3.0?

In this new version of the distribution, as mentioned at the beginning, the main novelty is the migration to Debian 10's "Buster" package base (the packages were synchronized with the Debian version 10.4) and on the Linux kernel version 4.19 is provided.

Another of the changes that stands out in Devuan 3.0 are the separate background processes of eudev and elogind to replace monolithic system components responsible for managing device files in the / dev directory, handling connection and / or disconnection of external devices, and managing user sessions.

Also, in this new version support for ppc64el architecture is now available, in addition to the previously supported platforms i386, amd64, armel, armhf, and arm64.

Also, we can find a new screen manager, plus loading layout is changed and a new desktop theme is proposed. You can optionally use the runit system manager as an alternative to / sbin / init and use the OpenRC initialization system as an alternative to the sysv-rc service and run-level controls.

Finally if you want to know more about it, you can check the details In the following link.

Download Devuan 3.0.0 Beowulf

If you want to download this Linux distribution you must go to its official website and in its download section you can get the system image from one of its available mirrors. The most recommended is that you use the one closest to you, the link is this.

How to upgrade to Devuan 3.0 Beowulf from Devuan 2.x?

Si If you have Devuan version 2.x installed, you can update to the new stable version without having to reinstall the system.

For this you must open a terminal and execute the following commands. First we are going to add the Devuan 3.0 repositories to our sources.list, which is located in the path: /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 beowulf main
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf-updates main
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf-security main
#deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf-backports main

We save the changes.

On the terminal we execute an update:

apt-get update

And then we type the following commands:

apt-get upgrade devuan-keyring

apt-get update

And finally we update the system with:

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 have to restart your computer for all the changes to take effect and when you start it again, you should see that you already have the new version of Devuan installed.

In case of package failure, the failed packages should be fixed and then start the update again.

apt-get -f install
apt-get dist-upgrade

Users who migrated from ASCII and are using upower will need to downgrade their upower packages to avoid issues:

apt-get install --allow-downgrades upower/beowulf gir1.2-upowerglib/beowulf
apt-get autoremove --purge
apt-get autoclean