The Devuan 4.0 "Chimaera" distribution, a fork of Debian GNU/Linux shipped without the systemd system manager, is released. The new branch is notable for moving to the Debian 11 "Bullseye" package base. Live builds and installation iso images for AMD64, i386, armel, armhf, arm64 and ppc64el architectures have been prepared for download.
The project has forked about 400 Debian packages that have been modified to get rid of systemd bindings, rebranding or adapting to Devuan's infrastructure features. Two packages (devuan-baseconf, jenkins-debian-glue-buildenv-devuan) are present only in Devuan and are related to setting up repositories and running the build system. Otherwise, Devuan is fully compatible with Debian and can be used as the basis for creating custom builds of Debian without systemd. Devuan-specific packages can be downloaded from the packages.devuan.org repository.
The default desktop is based on Xfce and the Slim display manager. Optionally available for installing KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, LXQt and LXDE. Instead of systemd, the classic SysVinit initialization system is supplied, as well as the optional openrc and runit systems. A non-D-Bus capability is provided that allows you to create minimalistic desktop configurations based on the blackbox, fluxbox, fvwm, fvwm-crystal and openbox window managers. To configure the network, a variant of the NetworkManager configurator is offered, which is not tied to systemd. Instead of systemd-udev, eudev is used, a fork of udev from the Gentoo project. Xfce and MATE use consolekit to manage user sessions, while the rest of the desktops use elogind, a variant of logind that is not tied to systemd.
Changes specific to Devuan 4:
- Switched to the Debian 11 package base (packages are synchronized with Debian 11.1) and the Linux 5.10 kernel.
- You can choose to use the sysvinit, runit and OpenRC initialization systems.
- Added a new theme for the boot screen saver, login manager and desktop.
- Implemented support for display managers gdm3 and sddm, in addition to Slim.
- Provided the ability to use without systemd all user environments available in Debian. Added support for LXDE.
- For people with vision problems, the possibility of voice guidance during the installation process is provided and support for displays based on Braille has been added.
Source: opennet.ru