The release of the Devuan 3.1 "Beowulf" distribution, a fork of Debian GNU/Linux that is provided without the system manager systemd, has been announced. Devuan 3.1 is an intermediate release that continues the development of the Devuan 3.x branch, built on the Debian 10 "Buster" package base. Live builds and installation ISO images for the AMD64 and i386 architectures are prepared for download. Builds for ARM (armel, armhf, and arm64) and images for of virtual machines the 3.1 release have not been formed (it is recommended to use Devuan 3.0 builds, after which the system can be updated via the package manager).
The project has created branches for around 400 Debian packages that have been modified to remove dependencies on systemd, for rebranding, or for adapting to the specific features of the Devuan infrastructure. Two packages (devuan-baseconf, jenkins-debian-glue-buildenv-devuan) are only available in Devuan and are related to repository configuration and the build system's operation. Otherwise, Devuan is fully compatible with Debian and can be used as a basis for creating specialized Debian builds without systemd. Devuan-specific packages can be downloaded from the repository packages.devuan.org.
The default desktop is based on Xfce and the Slim display manager. Optionally available for installation are KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, and LXQt. Instead of systemd, a classic SysVinit initialization system is provided, as well as optional openrc and runit systems. There is an option to run without D-Bus, which allows for the creation of minimalist desktop configurations based on window managers such as blackbox, fluxbox, fvwm, fvwm-crystal, and openbox. For network configuration, a NetworkManager configurator that is not tied to systemd is offered. Instead of systemd-udev, eudev, a Gentoo project's fork of udev, is used. For managing user sessions in KDE, Cinnamon, and LXQt, elogind, a logind variant not tied to systemd, is provided. Xfce and MATE use consolekit.
Changes specific to Devuan 3.1:
- The installer offers a choice of three initialization systems: sysvinit, openrc, and runit. In expert mode, there is an option to choose an alternative bootloader (lilo) and to disable the installation of non-free firmware.
- The fixes for vulnerabilities from Debian 10 have been ported. The Linux kernel has been updated to version 4.19.171.
- A new package debian-pulseaudio-config-override has been added to address the issue of PulseAudio being disabled by default. This package is automatically installed when selecting a desktop environment in the installer and comments out the setting "autospawn=no" in /etc/pulse/client.conf.d/00-disable-autospawn.conf.
- The issue of displaying "Debian" instead of "Devuan" in the boot menu has been resolved. To identify the system as "Debian", the name should be changed in the /etc/os-release file.
Source: opennet.ru
