Devuan is a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with which one ...

of the Debian Linux distribution that uses sysvinit,

runit runit is an init and service management scheme for Unix-like operating systems that initializes, supervises, and ends processes throughout the operating system. Runit is a reimplementation of the daemontools process supervision toolkit that r ...

OpenRC OpenRC is a dependency-based init system for Unix-like computer operating systems. It was created by Roy Marples, a NetBSD developer who was also active in the Gentoo project. It became more broadly adopted as an init system outside of Gentoo f ...

instead of systemd. Devuan aims to avoid "lock-in" by projects like systemd and aims to maintain compatibility with other init systems to avoid detaching

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

from other

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

systems.

History

With the release of Debian 8 some developers and users were alienated due to the project's adoption of systemd and subsequent removal of support for other existing init systems. This decision prompted some Debian community members to start a

of Debian without systemd. Instead of continuing the Debian practice of using

Toy Story ''Toy Story'' is a 1995 American computer-animated comedy film directed by John Lasseter (in his feature directorial debut), produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The first installment in the '' Toy Story ...

character names as release codenames, Devuan aliases its releases using planet names. The first stable release shared the Debian 8 codename '' Jessie''. However, the Devuan release was named for minor planet 10464. The first stable release of Devuan was published on May 25, 2017. Devuan 2.0.0 ''ASCII'' was released on June 9, 2018, and 2.1 ''ASCII'' was released on November 21, 2019. ASCII provides a choice of five different

desktop environment In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphica ...

s at install time ( XFCE, Cinnamon, KDE,

LXQt LXQt is a free and open source lightweight desktop environment. It was formed from the merger of the LXDE and Razor-qt projects. Like its GTK predecessor LXDE, LXQt does not ship or develop its own window manager, instead LXQt lets the user ...

, MATE), while many other window managers are available from the repositories. It also provides installation options for choosing between sysvinit and

for init, and between GRUB and LILO for the

boot loader A bootloader, also spelled as boot loader or called boot manager and bootstrap loader, is a computer program that is responsible for booting a computer. When a computer is turned off, its softwareincluding operating systems, application code, a ...

. Devuan maintains a modified version of the Debian expert text installer, which has the ability to install only

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

if the user chooses, while the live desktop image also uses a custom graphical installer from Refracta, a derivative of Devuan. Devuan 3.0 Beowulf was released on June 3, 2020, based on Debian 10.4. Ppc64el has been added to the list of supported architectures.

Runit runit is an init and service management scheme for Unix-like operating systems that initializes, supervises, and ends processes throughout the operating system. Runit is a reimplementation of the daemontools process supervision toolkit that r ...

is now available as an alternative init. Eudev and elogind are now used to replace some Systemd functionality. Devuan 4.0 Chimaera was released October 14, 2021. It is based on Debian Bullseye (11.1) with Linux kernel 5.10.

Packages

Devuan has its own package repository which mirrors upstream Debian, with local modifications made only when needed to allow for init systems other than systemd. Devuan does not provide systemd in its repositories but still retains libsystemd0 until it has removed all dependencies. Amprolla is the program used to merge Debian packages with Devuan packages. It downloads packages from Debian and merges changes to packages that Devuan overrides.

Derivatives

In August 2022, Peppermint OS announced the release of Devuan-based ISO's, alongside their Debian-based ISO's.

Version history

Source:

Notes

References

External links

*
Devuan home pageSource code repositoryRelease archive
{{Linux-distro Debian-based distributions Linux distributions Linux distributions without systemd