hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2064.txt

Episode: 2064
Title: HPR2064: Test-Driving Devuan
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2064/hpr2064.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 13:52:48

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This is HPR episode 2.64 entitled Test Riving Deview and it is hosted by Frank Mel and
in about 20 minutes long.
The summary is, Frank Mel takes the view and beat her out for a spin.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
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Hello, this is Frank Mel and today I want to talk briefly about Test Riving Dev1.
Dev1 is a fork of devian.
This spelled Dev1 by understand the canonical pronunciation is Dev1.
It's a result of devian decision to implement SystemD.
Back in January of 2014, devian announced that it was moving from System5, sometimes
referred to as SystemD to SystemD for an init system.
The reasons for doing this were basically that SystemD they found more reliable and more
orderly on startup.
This caused a great deal of consternation within the devian community.
The decision to switch to SystemD was reached only after a long and I gather from reading
about it, though I was not part of it, contentious discussion.
Opposition to SystemD seems to spring from a couple of primary thrusts.
One is that contrary to the Unix tradition of having a program that does one thing and
does it well, SystemD is a program that does many things.
When your OS starts using SystemD, SystemD doesn't just start up processes and then gracefully
go away.
It's always there managing stuff.
Now I'm not an expert in SystemD or in init systems.
This is, again, my restatement of stuff that I heard when the controversy was fresh.
I will include some links in the show notes to articles about this particular discussion.
So that's one argument against SystemD.
Another argument against SystemD was that SystemD is a binary.
Unlike traditional Unix and Linux startup systems, it does not rely on a series of scripts
which are executed and then once they've done their job, gracefully exit.
In order to manage SystemD, users need to learn a new command set and new syntax.
This caused much whaling and gnashing of teeth.
Another argument against SystemD tend to be based on personality.
SystemD was created by Leonard Pottering, who some of you may remember, was also the
father of Pulse Audio.
And when Pulse Audio was introduced some years ago and adopted by the early adapters within
the Linux distribution community, it tended so I've heard not to work or not to work properly
and generally be uncooperative.
Again, I'm never personally having counted that in this show as I have used that employee
Pulse Audio, but I'm not really on audio file.
Most of the stuff I listen to is voice.
SystemD does not seem to be very popular with a lot of persons.
He is by all accounts a genius with code.
I have heard him interview, he's quite personable and almost self-effacing in an interview.
You can look back amongst, I believe it was the Linux voice podcast, they had an interview
with him a year or a year and a half or so ago, but he does seem to rub lots of people
the wrong way.
And I have to say I think some of the opposition of SystemD was not based on the merits of
SystemD so much as on personal dislike of the creator.
I'm not making a judgment here, but that's where I have observed.
The third thrust of the criticism, one that seems to come right out of the father's
reaches of conspiracy theory, is that SystemD is part of an effort on the part of Red Hat
to reduce the rest of the Linux distributions to subservience.
That I find willow crest.
Red Hat has contributed, mightily, to the Linux community.
It was indeed one of the founders of the Linux community, along with Debian and Slack
where those are the three named distributions that still exist today.
And my own take of it is that Red Hat is interested in the well-being of Red Hat.
They're not looking to conquer Linux distributions, they're looking to conquer the enterprise and
that their main competition is not from other Linux distributions, as from certain computer
operating systems that tend to be headquartered in the state of Washington in the United States.
So that's my take on the origins.
As I said, I will include links to some articles about the controversy.
Shortly after Debian made its announcement, and as a footnote, at the time Debian made
this announcement, I was running Debian on one of my computers.
The computer that at the time I used as my home file server, that computer now has
happily gone to the great recycling place in the sky after many years of devoted service.
And running Debian quite happily.
In fact, my two favorite distributions are Slackware and Debian.
I was running at the time Debian testing and it ran quite happily until Debian pushed
out System D in the testing and they broke my server.
Now that had nothing to do with the merits of System D, I had set my Debian machine to
boot to the command line as all good computers should do using a little program called sysv.rc.com.
And with sysv.rc.com, you could tell the computer to boot into the traditional run level
3 with no X running.
Historically, Debian and Debian derivatives speak street run levels 3 through 5 all as the
same run level and boot into a display manager and then when you log in directly into X.
Once Debian pushed out System D in testing, my computer would boot to the command line.
I would log in and then a display manager would start and I'd have to log in again.
And I said to heck with this I put Slackware on the machine because I just didn't want
to deal with it at the time.
But I have always liked Debian, I like the stability that probably has something to do
with the fact I am also like Slackware.
I must prefer stable over bleeding edge.
Anyway, shortly after Debian announced the mood to System D, a movement developed to
fork Debian to a distro that used the traditional sysv in that a formal announcement of that
fork was made in November of 2014 with a goal of having a beta late the next spring.
That did not happen.
An offer was pushed out somewhere last year I happened to be carrying on a conversation
on some forum with someone who had been using Debian since the offer and said it had performed
well for him.
But I at that point since I was not really following the news, lost track of the story until
the register carried a story in late April of this year saying that a beta of Debian
had been released.
That struck my curiosity and I decided I'd take it out for a spin.
So I downloaded the Dev1 DVD-sized installation program and loaded it up in the virtual box.
I installed it in the virtual box on a couple of different computers and I installed it
several times simply to try out some different combinations.
So for the purpose of recording this podcast, I downloaded the current Debian release and
installed it to a VM because I noticed some things in the Dev1 installation routine that
had not been present the last time I had installed Debian several years ago.
I will not go into the details of the installation routine, it's fairly straightforward stuff.
You pick your language, you pick your keyboard, you get the Debian used to have also about
whether or not you want to participate in their popularity contest to keep track of which
software packages are most popular and as is the case with Debian, the answer defaulted
to no which I find quite courteous.
Having these duration processes for the two distributions, Debian, Jesse and Dev1,
Jesse, data as they call it, they are step by step the same.
Now I do note considering how relatively new it is that Dev1 seemed to have a fairly
good network of mirrors around the world based on the menu selection presented from
mirror selection during the install process.
I am certain it is nowhere nearly as extensive as Debian's but it seemed to have pretty
good geographical coverage around the earth.
One thing I noticed that I had not seen before in a Debian install was after the base system
was installed and the time came to select your software.
Now that step I recall from earlier versions of Debian and the choice would be say web server,
SSH server, basic tools with basic tools defaulted.
Now there was an addition, an addition to web server, print server, a couple of other selections.
You had a choice of desktops and this was the case in both Dev1 and Debian.
You could choose from among the Debian default desktop which still is Known 3, KDE, LXDE,
XFCE, Matai, Cinnamon and instead of having the default and then if you want something
else you have to go out and get it, you could pick something other than the default
at that point.
You can even choose to install multiple environments and then switch back and forth between them
from the session chooser at the login screen.
And I both installed the default desktops which for Dev1 by the way is not Known 3.
This I consider a point in Dev1's favor but is XFCE.
I installed both of them with various multiple dektops.
I did a combination of Matai and KDE on the one Dev1 install.
I did Known 3 and XFCE on a Dev1 install and they worked just fine.
But here's a little thing.
If you pick two desktop environments that each come with their own display manager,
say as Known comes with GDM and KDE comes with KDM, both display managers.
After you pick your desktops, the install program will prop you to pick which display manager
you want to use.
I would say this and I did run into this issue.
I picked Slim SLIM.
I think that's for simple Linux manager or some of the of that nature.
I believe it's the one that comes with LXTE.
If you're installing multiple desktops, I would not recommend Slim.
Now this is an a virtual machine so the experience on bare metal may be different but with Slim
I could not find a session chooser.
So if I had installed say LXTE and XFCE and the SLIM display manager, once I got to
the login page, I could not find a way to change my choice of desktops.
And I clicked everywhere there was to click and tabed everywhere there was to tab.
I did not have this problem if I chose KDM or GDM.
Really I don't have strong feelings about display managers.
I don't get worked up without having pretty wallpaper there because when you're going
to do it, you're going to log in and you're going to go up and do whatever you've signed
on to the computer to do in the first place.
It's just like a garage door opener for your computer.
And once your car is in the garage or out of the garage, whichever way you're going,
who cares.
But that I found interesting.
And it's interesting too that you get this choice on desktops in both Debian and Dev1.
I also found this and this was true with both Debian and Dev1.
If you choose the plain text install rather than the graphical install, that's a poor
choice because the color choices for the display dialogs put difficult to read colors.
If you have a highlight that you highlight your language as English or at the false to
English, it's going to be white, white letters are a word background and it's very difficult
to read what the highlighted or selected item is.
You have to cursor off it all that's English and cursor back up to it and proceed.
So I would recommend unless you have particularly sharp eyes, I would recommend using the graphical
installation routine.
Now, both of these, but when I installed, they included Libra Office, the GAMP, a full
suite of programs, the default web browser was Ice Weasel.
I understand that Ice Weasel will ultimately be going away that the branding dispute between
Debian and Mozilla was led to Debian's very branding Firefox as Ice Weasel has been resolved
and Ice Weasel will at some future time go back to being Firefox.
I have no idea when that will be.
I did note that the text browser that comes pre-installed on Dev1 is W3M, which quite
tickle my fancy.
I do like W3M, but normally if you have a pre-installed text browser, it's going to be
links or links, L-Y-N-X-R-L-I-N-K-F.
Anyway, I've been using now Dev1 regularly, still in a virtual machine, but using it regularly
for some of the tasks I do, and it has performed quite nicely.
Nothing I have tried to do has given me any indication that this is a beta program still
in testing.
The things I've tried to do have all worked flawlessly.
It is, in short, a nice piece of work for all that it was nearly a year behind schedule.
Really catch on.
Frankly, I don't think it will.
For one thing, SystemD has something going for it.
SystemD, whatever you think of its philosophy, works.
I have a friend named Mark Davis several years ago.
I actually interviewed him for a podcast here at HPR.
Mark is a long time Linux Sisted Men before that he was a Unix Sisted Men, but he says
SystemD works very nicely in tell that the system with the SystemD start efficiently
and smoothly.
The only problem he's mentioned to me is that when SystemD breaks, it's more difficult
to diagnose what the problem is.
And that's because he knows how to diagnose SystemD, anything using SystemFive.
He's been doing it for years.
He's got to learn how to diagnose SystemD.
I've been using Magia on one of my computers for several years at UserSystemD.
It works fine.
There have been no problems.
So my personal opinion as strictly an observer is that by the time DevWon is ready for prime
time, it made me ready for prime time tomorrow, for all I know, based on the performance of
the Veda, a lot of the impetus that a year and a half ago created the controversy will
have died out and people will have moved on.
Those people who are irrevocably hostile to SystemD are already using Slackware.
And I just don't think DevWon will have the momentum to maintain itself as a project.
I think that's a shame, that's just my opinion.
I think they've done an excellent job of work there.
And if you're curious about DevWon, certainly I'd urge you to give it a try because it
does work very nicely.
Thank you very much.
If you want to contact me, you can email me at Frank at PineViewFarm.net and my website
is PineViewFarm.net.
Thank you very much.
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