Getting Devuan 🔼
Devuan releases come in the form of ISO image files. Obtaining a Devuan release involves selecting the appropriate image for your use case and hardware, downloading that image, a checksum file and its digital signature, verifying your download and -- in most cases -- [applying/writing/putting] the image [to/on] some form of hardware support.
Release images 🔼
Note: Having a section "Personal Computers", containing info on installation and live images (like on devuan.org1), is misleading, for you would use the same installation images to get Devuan up and running on a server. → Omit heading "Personal computers", put all the general info on images in the intro, go with sections "Installation images", "Live images", "Embedded Devices", "Virtual machines".
Devuan offers several types of release images:
- installation images, which, as their name suggests, are used to install Devuan to your hard drive
- live images, which make it possible to run Devuan without installing it
- images for running Devuan on embedded devices
- images for installing Devuan on a virtual machine
- talk about hw architectures
- several different hardware architectures
- explain ports (i386, amd64...) → link to devuan ports overview for detailed info on all supported architectures
Installation images 🔼
- explain image variants (DVD, CD, NETINST)
- The ISO files
netinst,CDandDVDare hybrid images and can be either burned on a CD/DVD or used as a USB key image. Once toasted on a support they will run the usual operating system installer.2
* Installation and live images can be written either to optical discs (CD/DVD/BD) or USB flash devices (see below).
* one: flash devices don't have to be USB
* two: you could just as well write the image to an HDD
* three: you only toast things to optical discs
Live images 🔼
- have a look at
- https://www.debian.org/distrib
- https://www.debian.org/CD/live
Live images make it possible to run a complete Devuan system directly from a removable medium, such as a CD, USB key or SD card, without installing it onto your computer.
- The
liveimage can be put on a USB or SD card usingddand then booted directly from it.3
- Thus, using one of the live images is a great way to try out Devaun out before installing it and is much recommended for that purpose.
- mention that you can install from running live systems
Two kinds of live images/Live images come in two versions.
- desktop-live
- minimal-live
The live image is what we really consider to be the Devuan desktop, so please if you do a review of Devuan used as a desktop distribution refer to our live release.4
- seems to need some additional commas
- also, shouldn't
livebedesktop-livehere?
The minimal-live image is a fully featured live version of Devuan working only for console, coming with a set of packages that are handy and fun to have if you love terminals and don't use X. It is also equipped to work well for blind people.5
- replace "X" with a general term (e.g., graphical environment)
Embedded devices 🔼
- copy text from https://devuan.org/os/documentation/install
Virtual machines 🔼
- copy text from https://devuan.org/os/documentation/install
- mention that with these images you don't have to create a boot medium, but use them directly (just make it evident from the explanation of what a vm-image is)
Download 🔼
Devuan release images can be downloaded from files.devuan.org or one of its mirror sites. Please use a mirror, if possible. For a complete list, see Appendix List of Devuan mirrors
We recommend downloading devuan using our release torrent or magnet link.6 The torrent contains all files for a given release. You can select what files to download if you have limited bandwidth or storage.7
Whatever download method you choose, make sure that, apart from the image(s) you download, you also get the the corresponding SHA256SUMS and SHA256SUMS.asc files from the same directory. You will need them to verify your download later.
Verification 🔼
To ensure data integrity, Devuan offers checksums (currently SHA-256) for all its release images. Checksums for particular images are listed in the file SHA256SUMS within the respective download directory. Every checksum file comes with a digital signature (SHA256SUMS.asc) that can be verified to make sure that file has really been issued by the Devuan project.
To verify a downloaded image, first get the checksum file (SHA256SUMS) from the same server directory you downloaded your image from. Then check your image against that file by running the following command inside your download directory:
sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS
If the image is correct, the output should contain something like:
devuan_jessie_1.0.0_amd64_NETINST.iso: OK
To ensure that the checksum file itself is correct, use GnuPG to verify it against the accompanying signature file (SHA256SUMS.asc).[^8]
gpg --verify SHA256SUMS.asc
- if you don't have the key used to sign the file, that will cause an error:
gpg: assuming signed data in `SHA256SUMS'
gpg: Signature made Tue May 23 13:20:12 2017 CEST using RSA key ID F78637DE
gpg: Can't check signature: public key not found
- get the key:
gpg --recv-keys F78637DE
gpg: requesting key F78637DE from hkp server keys.gnupg.net
gpg: key FA1B0274: public key "parazyd <parazyd@dyne.org>" imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: imported: 1 (RSA: 1)
- try again:
gpg --verify SHA256SUMS.asc
gpg: assuming signed data in `SHA256SUMS'
gpg: Signature made Tue May 23 13:20:12 2017 CEST using RSA key ID F78637DE
gpg: Good signature from "parazyd <parazyd@dyne.org>"
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg: There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: 0333 7671 FDE7 5BB6 A85E C91F B876 CB44 FA1B 0274
Subkey fingerprint: 9E60 DE76 0149 1765 8354 CA62 F0CB 28FC F786 37DE
[TODO: Include info on how to verify that key is a valid Devuan release key. ]
Preparing media 🔼
To create a bootable installation or live medium, you will need to write the Devuan image to either an optical disc (CD/DVD/BD), a flash device (e.g., a USB memory stick) or hard disk./[the Devuan image will need to be written to...]
- images can either be written to optical discs (CD/DVD/BD) or USB flash devices
Optical discs (CD/DVD/BD) 🔼
The easiest way to create a bootable disc from the downloaded image is using the "write image to disc" mode of your favorite burning tool.
Note: Make sure you're not merely copying the image file itself to the disc, because that won't give you a bootable medium.
On GNU/Linux, BSD or Unix systems, you can use cdrecord or cdrskin to write the image to an optical disc via the command line. Both share the same syntax:
cdrecord -v speed=4 devuan_jessie_1.0.0_amd64_NETINST.iso
cdrskin -v speed=4 devuan_jessie_1.0.0_amd64_NETINST.iso
In case you have problems writing your image to a disc as described here, see the appendix [Preparing optical discs](appendix/Preparing optical discs) for further explanation.
Flash devices and hard disks 🔼
On GNU/Linux, BSD or Unix systems, you can use the dd command to write the downloaded image to a flash device or a hard disk.
First, to get the correct device name, check the output of dmesg, lsblk or whichever tool is available for that on your system.
Make sure the device is not mounted. Then run the dd command and after that the sync command as shown below, replacing /dev/sdX with the actual device name of the target and the image file name with the file name of the image you've downloaded. Running these commands may require superuser privileges.
Beware that this operation will destroy all data still residing on the target device!
dd bs=4M if=devuan_jessie_1.0.0_amd64_NETINST.iso of=/dev/sdX && sync
- add instructions on how to put images for embedded devices on sd cards
Available resources:
- https://devuan.org/ (section "Download")
- https://devuan.org/os/documentation/install
Copied from https://devuan.org/os/documentation/install. Keep in mind that
CDimages will be dropped in the near future. ↩Should this really be a recommendation? Better just make it an option. ↩
Copied from https://devuan.org/#download. ↩