News: 1634263083

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Devuan debuts version 4.0 – as usual without a hint of the hated systemd

(2021/10/15)


The team of self-described "veteran Unix admins" who opposed Debian's adoption of systemd instead of sysvinit init , have released a fourth version of their alternative Linux distro, "Devuan".

Devuan Chimaera 4.0 is based on Debian 11.1, and version 5.10 of the Linux Kernel. That version of the kernel enjoys long-term support until 2026, and Debian 11.1 will also be tended to until that year. Devuan's devs are clearly thinking long-term!

The new release delivers on Devuan's vision of init freedom by offering users a choice between sysvinit , runit , and OpenRC . The default desktop is Xfce, but Cinnamon, KDE, LXQt, and MATE are available as alternatives. It's possible to add others once the OS is installed.

[1]

"Virtually all desktop environments available in Debian are now part of Devuan, systemd -free", states Devuan's [2]release announcement . A glance at Debian's [3]list of supported desktops might lead to a difference of opinion.

[4]Debian 11 formally debuts and hits the Bullseye

[5]Systemd 249 release candidate includes better support for immutable OSes and provisioning images

[6]Devuan adds third init option in sixth birthday release

One big new inclusion is the chance to install a desktop environment without also installing pulseaudio.

"This enables speech synthesis in both a graphical and console session at the same time," reads the Devuan 4.0 [7]release notes . "This configuration is created by the task-speech-accessibility and devuan-speech-dispatcher-config-override packages which are installed by default when the 'Install with SpeechSynthesis' option (‘s <enter>‘ on BIOS systems, ‘s’ on UEFI systems at the boot prompt) is selected."

[8]

The release notes also include a warning that the version of exim used in Devuan 4.0 "introduces the concept of tainted data read from untrusted sources, like e.g. message sender or recipient".

Tainted data – such as $local_part or $domain – cannot be used as names for files, directories or commands.

[9]

"This will break configurations which are not updated accordingly," the release notes warn. "Old Debian exim configuration files also will not work unmodified; the new configuration needs to be installed with local modifications merged in."

>Devuan runs on the i386, amd64, armel, armhf, arm64 and ppc64el architectures, is yours for the downloading [10]here , and can be installed from scratch, as an upgrade from previous Devuan releases or by migrating from Debian. ®

Get our [11]Tech Resources



[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YWj8-0joBJr5kK5vAX5l2gAAAEA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[2] https://www.devuan.org/os/announce/chimaera-release-announce-2021-10-14

[3] https://wiki.debian.org/DesktopEnvironment

[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/16/debian_11_bullseye_released/

[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/16/systemd_249_release_candidate/

[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/16/devuan_3_10_adds_runit_init/

[7] https://files.devuan.org/devuan_chimaera/Release_notes.txt

[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YWj8-0joBJr5kK5vAX5l2gAAAEA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YWj8-0joBJr5kK5vAX5l2gAAAEA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[10] https://www.devuan.org/get-devuan

[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/



Q: What do little WASPs want to be when they grow up?
A: The very best person they can possibly be.