Migrate to Devuan Ascii 🔼
This document describes how to migrate to Devuan Ascii from Debian Jessie or Stretch.
Migrating from the GNOME desktop 🔼
Because there is no transitional package yet GNOME users will need to install xfce4 and slim manually. Choose slim as the default display manager when prompted.
root@debian:~# apt-get install xfce4 slim
Set the session manager to startxfce4 so that the new desktop can be used later.
root@debian:~# update-alternatives --config x-session-manager
Replacing network manager with wicd 🔼
If you are relying on network manager for network access you need to change to wicd now. Another option is [manual network configuration](manual network configuration).
root@debian:~# apt-get install wicd
Make sure network manager is removed from the boot process.
root@debian:~# update-rc.d -f network-manager remove
Wireless connections should now be configured to automatically connect with wicd. Stop network manager before configuring your network.
root@debian:~# /etc/init.d/network-manager stop
Perform the migration 🔼
Devuan uses sysvinit by default so we will install this now.
root@debian:~# apt-get install sysvinit-core
A reboot is required to switch sysvinit to pid1 so we can remove systemd.
root@debian:~# reboot
We can now remove systemd without any complaints.
root@debian:~# apt-get purge systemd
Edit the sources.list file so that we can switch to the Devuan repositories.
root@debian:~# editor /etc/apt/sources.list
Add the Devuan mirrors with the Ascii branch name. Comment out any other lines.
deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged ascii main
deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged ascii-updates main
deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged ascii-security main
deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged ascii-backports main
Update the package indexes so we can install the Devuan archive keyring.
root@debian:~# apt-get update
Install the Devuan keyring so packages can be authenticated from this point onwards.
root@debian:~# apt-get install devuan-keyring --allow-unauthenticated
Update the package indexes again so that they are authenticated with the keyring.
root@debian:~# apt-get update
Finally we can migrate to Devuan.
root@debian:~# apt-get dist-upgrade
Post migration tasks 🔼
systemd components should now be removed from the system.
root@devuan:~# apt-get purge systemd-shim
If you are not using D-Bus or xorg you might be able to remove libsystemd0.
root@devuan:~# apt-get purge libsystemd0
Purge any orphaned packages left over from your previous Debian install.
root@devuan:~# apt-get autoremove --purge
This is a good time to clean out old package archives left over from your Debian system.
root@devuan:~# apt-get autoclean