The new version of Devuan 2.1 "ASCII" arrives, the fork of Debian without systemd

return 2.1

After a year and a half of the formation of the 2.0 branch of Devuan, has been introduced the launch of a new version, coming this to Devuan 2.1 "ASCII". For those who do not know about this distro, you should know that it is a fork of Debian but that this has as its main characteristic that it does not have the system administrator "Systemd".

Devuan arose before the disagreement and the uproar that it caused in the community of the users Debian's decision of using systemd on Debian. This is where Devuan arises as the primary goal of the project is to provide a Debian variant without the complexities and dependencies of systemd, an init system and service manager originally developed by Red Hat and later adopted by most other distros.

The aim of Devuan is to respect the original principles of Debian, but also keep the simplicity and minimalism of the basic components of the system, unlike the choices made by the systemd project. The main difference is the complete absence of systemd and its default components.

Under the Devuan project, Versions for 381 Debian packages are supported, modified to get rid of systemd bindings, rebranding or adaptation to the characteristics of the Devuan infrastructure.

Two packets (devuan-baseconf, jenkins-debian-glue-buildenv-devuan) They are present only in Devuan and are related to the configuration of the repositories and the operation of the build system. Devuan is fully compatible with Debian and can be used as a basis for building specialized Debian builds without systemd.

To configure the network, a NetworkManager configurator option is proposed that is not tied to systemd. Instead of systemd-udev, eudev is involved, a udev fork of the Gentoo project.

Main novelties of Devuan 2.1

This new version of the system continues to use the base of the Debian 9 package "Stretch". The transition to the base of the Debian 10 package will be made in the Devuan 3 "Beowulf" release, which is currently in development.

Of the changes highlighted in the Devuan 2.1 announcement, you will be able to find the adding a standard option to use the OpenRC initialization system in the installation pictures. The ability to use OpenRC as an alternative to SysVinit it was available before, but required manipulation in expert install mode.

In expert mode only, features such as changing the bootloader (install lilo instead of grub) and removing proprietary firmware are still provided. The default repository is deb.devuan.org, which is randomly cast to one of 12 mirrors (country-specific mirrors must be set separately).

Live versions which include the memtest86 +, lvm2 and mdadm packages and to them a patch has been applied to DBus, at boot time, generating a new system identifier (machine ID) for DBus (the use of the identifier is configured via / etc / default / dbus).

Devuan 2.1 builds also include all updates for Debian 9 with the removal of vulnerabilities that were previously delivered through the standard package update installation system.

Of the package updates worth noting are the following:

  • apt (1.4.9) to fix CVE-2019-3462
  • linux-image-4.9.0-9 (4.9.168-1 + deb9u4) to fix multiple vulnerabilities
  • firefox-esr (60.8.0esr-1 ~ deb9u1) to fix multiple vulnerabilities
  • policykit-1 to fix CVE-2018-19788 and CVE-2019-6133
  • php-imagick CVE-2019-11037.
  • chrome CVE-2019-13723, CVE-2019-13724
  •  thunderbird CVE-2019-15903, CVE-2019-11764, CVE-2019-11763, CVE-2019-11762, CVE-2019-11761, CVE-2019-11760, CVE-2019-11759, CVE-2019-11757, CVE -2019-11755.
  • dpdk CVE-2019-14818.
  • qemu (bug fixed on virtualized MSR)
  • intel-microcode CVE-2019-11135, CVE-2019-11139.

If you want to know more about this new release, you can consult the publication In the following link. 

Download Devuan 2.1 «ASCII»

Live versions and installation iso images for the AMD64 and i386 architectures have been prepared for download (no official images for ARM and virtual machines have been created at this time and will be prepared later by the community).

To get the system image You must go to its official website and in its download section you can obtain the image of the system from one of its available mirrors. It is best to use the one closest to you, the link is this.


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