LMDV, anyone?

[curtvaughan]

I know this is a bit off the wire, but as a follower of the mailing list for the Devuan distro project I have to wonder: if the Devuan developers somehow bring to fruition a first production version of Devuan as an easily distributed ISO, would there be any interest among the LMDE developers of perhaps coming up with a Mint version of Devuan? I hope this doesn't degenerate into some sort of systemd pro or con war, as that is old hash. But given that there is a distinct minority of linux users who would prefer not to have systemd, might this eventually be an option? - basically, Debian with a Minty flavor sans systemd.

Cheers, more beers!

[xenopeek]

Linux Mint is satisfied with Debian as a base. It can be used with or without systemd init; LMDE 2 uses it without systemd init. LMDE 3 will not be worked on till Debian 9 is on the horizon (likely due mid 2017, though Debian 8 has support till mid 2018 and extended support till mid 2020). With all the tasks that are there for the developers, their just isn't the time to work on yet another edition without sacrificing something else.

Besides the above reasons, for the same reason Linux Mint hasn't switched to systemd init with LMDE 2 (technology deemed too new; let others sort out early issues first) Linux Mint will also not use Devuan any time soon.

In any case you can do this yourself according to the Devuan website. So for your "distinct minority" that care about this there likely is a way. Have you tested this with LMDE 2?

One can just migrate to Devuan by installing devuan-baseconf.deb which will re-configure the system with our source repository

[Fred Barclay]

I've thought that this would be an interesting idea. (NOTE: I'm not opposed to systemd, but I know very little about it.) But, as xeno said, Betsy doesn't use systemd by default, so I think LMDV would be redundant as an official release at this time.

Maybe if enough of us think this would be an interesting hobby, we could get something together. I've got a spare partition on my hard drive...

[Crewp]

I agree with Xenopeek, we can run LMDE now with systemd or not. The dev's have to much to do now than to make another spin of LMDE. I really like Debian but the war over systemd is silly. I've run LMDE under systemd and I don't see any difference ( on the surface that is ) underneath I"m not sure.

[killer de bug]

Betsy doesn't use systemd by default, so I think LMDV would be redundant as an official release at this time.

Well this is not exactly true! Systemd is not used as the init system, that's right. But systemd is there for other parts of the system.

Code: Select all

KDB@KDB-laptop ~ $ ps -efa|grep init
root         1     0  0 19:34 ?        00:00:00 init

Code: Select all

KDB@KDB-laptop ~ $ apt policy sysvinit-core systemd-shim systemd-sysv
sysvinit-core:
  Installé : 2.88dsf-59
  Candidat : 2.88dsf-59
 Table de version :
 *** 2.88dsf-59 0
        500 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ jessie/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
systemd-shim:
  Installé : 9-1
  Candidat : 9-1
 Table de version :
 *** 9-1 0
        500 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ jessie/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
systemd-sysv:
  Installé : (aucun)
  Candidat : 215+12+betsy
 Table de version :
     215+12+betsy 0
        700 http://packages.linuxmint.com/ betsy/upstream amd64 Packages
     215-17+deb8u2 0
        500 http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ jessie/main amd64 Packages

Sysvinit is the init system.

Code: Select all

KDB@KDB-laptop ~ $ ps -eaf|grep [s]ystemd
root      1838     1  0 19:34 ?        00:00:00 /sbin/cgmanager --daemon -m name=systemd
root      3308     1  0 19:36 ?        00:00:00 /lib/systemd/systemd-logind

Despite this, systemd is present and running.

[Fred Barclay]

Betsy doesn't use systemd by default, so I think LMDV would be redundant as an official release at this time.

Well this is not exactly true! Systemd is not used as the init system, that's right. But systemd is there for other parts of the system.

Despite this, systemd is present and running.

[bigbenaugust]

I am much more interested in the LMDE variant based on Debian k/FreeBSD...

[GeneBenson]

I believe one of the reasons the Mint team based the main edition on Ubuntu is because they knew Ubuntu would be around for a long time and provide a reliable base to build on. The same applies to LMDE1/2.Debian isn't going to disappear overnight. I'm not sure the same can be said for Devuan.

Whatever your feelings are concerning systemd it's going to be harder and harder to avoid it. I have been using systemd on "straight" Debian tracking testing for at least a year now and it has been pretty much incident free. Most of the objections I see concerning systemd are "principle" based rather than "performance". I guess I have fewer principles.

In the next LTS version of Ubuntu (and by extension LM18) the default init system will be systemd (at least that's what's being speculated). It's a pretty good bet that LMDE3 will also make the switch to systemd.

My advice: If you have a spare partition to play with then install LMDE2 and then make the switch to systemd. Why? To gain some experience with systemd. You just know that once the switch is made to systemd this forum will be swamped with questions about it. This is your chance to get ahead of the game.

[xenopeek]

You just know that once the switch is made to systemd this forum will be swamped with questions about it.

How so? Most users do not interact with their init system nor with their OS' userland. The occasional venture onto the terminal and running some commands is for most users only done when they encounter some issue and on the forums or IRC they are advised to run some commands (mostly inxi for information gathering).

If and when Linux Mint switches to use systemd for init and OS userland a terse guide could easily cover the essential commands to know. The two most used commands would be systemctl and journalctl (there are also GUI counterparts). For example use "sudo systemctl start name" to start a service. You can guess how to stop, restart, reload, enable, or disable a service; or how to get its status. journalctl to access the logs has various ways to show only the messages you are interested in, but in its simplest form "journalctl -b" shows messages from your current boot and you can pipe this into grep and such if you prefer.

Anyway, we're getting sidetracked as the topic was about the merits of a Devuan based edition. Not about trying to convince others about the merits of systemd.

[GermanyChris]

You can convert to LMDE to systemd!

Is there a guide or is it as simple as apt-get install?

[killer de bug]

This should give you an answer: https://wiki.debian.org/systemd

[GermanyChris]

This should give you an answer: https://wiki.debian.org/systemd

I should have just gone to the Debian wiki I hate failing to RTFM.

Thanks!

[Habitual]

I consider it badge of honor when people want to turn every other distro into a LinuxMint 'spin'.

[curtvaughan]

I consider it badge of honor when people want to turn every other distro into a LinuxMint 'spin'.

And rightly so! Mint flavors of both Ubuntu and Debian - but especially Debian - give me the best of both worlds I care about: user "friendliness" from a very usable desktop environment, and technically informative forums sans most vitriol I've found to be ubiquitous in Debian and others such as Arch. Though the desktop organization is very user oriented with Mageia, the associated forums are also quite sparse and unresponsive. Clem and his teams have found a great balance between technical, philosophical, and practical.