This guide replaces the previous migration guide, and is fully up to date. dev1fanboy.

Migrate to Devuan Jessie 🔼

This document describes how to migrate to Devuan Jessie from Debian.

Performing the migration 🔼

We need to edit the mirrors list so we can set the Devuan repository as the source for packages.

root@debian:~# editor /etc/apt/sources.list

Change your mirrors to the Devuan mirror, commenting out the previous Debian mirrors.

deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged jessie main
deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged jessie-updates main
deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged jessie-security main
deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged jessie-backports main

Before we can fetch packages from the Devuan repository we need to update the package index files.

root@debian:~# apt-get update

The Devuan keyring is required to authenticate packages.

root@debian:~# apt-get install devuan-keyring --allow-unauthenticated

Now that the Devuan keyring is installed you should update the indexes again so that packages are authenticated from now on.

root@debian:~# apt-get update

We can now migrate to Devuan. Choose slim as the default display manager if prompted.

root@debian:~# apt-get dist-upgrade

In order to remove systemd as pid1 a one time reboot is required.

root@devuan:~# reboot

Post migration tasks 🔼

If you were using GNOME under Debian before migration I recommend changing the session manager to startxfce4.

root@devuan:~# update-alternatives --config x-session-manager

systemd components should now be removed from the system.

root@devuan:~# apt-get purge systemd systemd-shim

If you are not using D-Bus 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