Devuan GNU+Linux is a free software operating system for your computer. Free software means you are free to use, copy and distribute, study, change the software, and share your modifications with the community.

software freedom, your way

Devuan Jessie 1.0.0 - 1st stable release candidate (RC)

Dear Init Freedom Lovers,

Once again the Veteran Unix Admins salute you!

Our April 2017 gift to you is the long-awaited release of Devuan Jessie stable release candidate (1.0.0-RC). If all goes as planned, this will be our first Devuan stable release and our first long term support (LTS) release as well.

Two and a half years have passed since our initial Debian fork declaration https://www.devuan.org/os/announce/ and not even one year since our first beta release http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/devuan-beta-release.

This Devuan Jessie release candidate is as close as we can get to a “long term support” universal base distribution free from systemd, in the original spirit of Debian.

The final Devuan Jessie release will follow shortly and then we will turn our attention to “Ascii”, the current testing branch.

We wish to thank all of you for the incredible support given to this development effort, and for engaging in the process of making Devuan a useful and reliable base distro, as well as a pleasant, cooperative community.

What has improved in Devuan Jessie

The wifi autodetection problems present in the beta release series have been fixed.

The problem that prevented samba from installing has been fixed.

Devuan now directly provides different base distribution flavours: desktop-live (finally the purpy experience), embedded, minimal-live and installer-iso.

Devuan’s Simple Distro Kit (SDK) is rapidly approaching maturity, with a full set of scripts and documentation to roll your own Devuan-based distro in any flavor. https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=551

The Refracta scripts are now included in Devuan, which makes it easy to toast a new live distro from the state of a running one.

Devuan’s infrastructure is now powered by the ‘debbugs’ bug tracking system originally written by Ian Jackson, and the ‘reportbug’ tool works as expected.

Package maintenance has been demystified and partially automated with d1h - the Devuan packaging helper https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=549 - which simplifies the task of interacting with the Devuan continuous integration pipeline and makes it easier for developers to package their projects for Devuan correctly. Please consider rolling up your sleeves and joining the development team!

ARM support has improved: Devuan now provides base SD card images for 11 different hardware platforms: raspi1, raspi2, raspi3, chromeacer, chromeveyron, cubieboard2, cubietruck, lime2, micro, N900, odroidxu. When applicable (sunxi boards) ARM images are powered by mainline 4.10.y Linux kernels.

Downloads

Official Devuan images are distributed via the website https://files.devuan.org/devuan_jessie_rc/

To ease the load on our bandwidth we kindly ask you to use one of the following mirrors:

All files offered for download come with their SHA256 hash to check the integrity (either in the SHA256SUMS or in the .sha files) and with a cryptographic signature made using GnuPG by one of the Devuan developers in charge of the build, included as .asc file.

An understanding of Devuan’s script-friendly file naming scheme and directory structure will help you find what you need. https://www.devuan.org/os/filenaming

Related projects

Here is a short list of projects which use Devuan as a base OS for their research and development:

Dowse - the IoT awareness Hub which won the ISOC NL Innovation prize 2016 is based on Devuan and just released its 1.0 beta: https://dowse.eu

DECODE - An R&D project on data sovereignty and blockchain technology financed with 5M EUR by the EU Commission is based on Devuan: http://decodeproject.eu

heads - a live distro focused on privacy, security, and freedoms, experimenting with Devuan Ascii, and having a workshop @ http://2017.rmll.info: https://heads.dyne.org

Distributions based on Devuan

In chronological order of appearance:

Upgrade

Devuan can be adopted as a flawless upgrade path from both Debian Wheezy and Jessie. This is a main goal for the Devuan Jessie stable release and has proven to be a very stable operation every time it has been performed. Detailed installation and upgrade instructions are available including translations https://www.devuan.org/os/documentation/dev1fanboy/.

The Devuan Apt package repositories are: ~~~ deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged jessie main deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged jessie-updates main deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged jessie-security main ~~~ We provide access to our package repository also via Tor: ~~~ deb tor+http://devuanfwojg73k6r.onion/merged jessie main deb tor+http://devuanfwojg73k6r.onion/merged jessie-updates main deb tor+http://devuanfwojg73k6r.onion/merged jessie-security main ~~~

After replacing Debian’s package sources with the ones above, run: ~~~ apt-get update apt-get install devuan-keyring apt-get dist-upgrade ~~~

Then proceed with a reboot, which will keep sysvinit as init or revert to it in case the machine was running Debian Jessie.

Additional package repositories are available, but considered experimental:

deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged jessie-backports main
        deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged jessie-proposed-updates  main
        deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/devuan jessie-proposed  main
        deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/devuan experimental main

# Growing support

More and more users are installing/upgrading Devuan on a daily basis. This expanded user-base will help to fine tune the final Jessie release.

Please report bugs to our Bug Tracking System (BTS) https://bugs.devuan.org/ using the reportbug tool available in the repos or directly by email.

As our journey led by world-class experts, supporters, enthusiasts and donors continues, we acknowledge with heartfelt thanks and appreciation every one of you.

Our distrowatch page is on http://distrowatch.com/devuan (and we are very proud of it! thanks Distrowatch for all the early support!)

Community

Devuan’s web forum is on https://dev1galaxy.org

IRC channels: #devuan #debianfork #devuan-dev #devuan-www #devuan-fr and perhaps even more on freenode.net

Announce mailinglist (low traffic, only release announcements) https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devuan-announce

Discussion mailinglist (high volume traffic) https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

Init Freedom

Devuan is about choice. We think people should be able to choose whether to use a GNU+Linux system with or without systemd.

Devuan decided to fork not only the base distribution, but also its governance, because Debian has made it difficult to avoid systemd as init, entangling the system with unnecessary dependencies. We encourage potential Devuan users who wish to install systemd to use Debian’s installer, Debian’s packages and Debian’s mailing lists, all available directly from Debian’s mirrors.

Devuan is the Debian that was and could have been. Our goal is to provide a viable and sustainable alternative. It is a new path, nurtured with your help and support.

To support the Devuan project: https://www.devuan.org/donate

happy hacking ;^)

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