How do I make lish work after installing Devuan?
I have recently been replacing Debian Linux with Devuan Linux, because I hate systemd with a burning, abiding hatred which will burn down the whole world if I do not.
It was actually not hard ( I downloaded the minimalist livecd/installer, rsynced everything onto a small partition which will eventually be my /boot partition, and then convinced it to boot ).
But in the process, there was one piece of collateral damage: weblish.
I am able to see grub with weblish, but once I boot, the screen just stops moving. If, however, I switch to glish, I can see the booted box. Even hours later, the last thing I see in the weblish window is "boot".
What do I need to do to fix that? Is it a serial console issue? I don't really know how it works in the first place.
8 Replies
jdutton
Linode Staff
Hey @PopeIndigent. In my experience, I haven't seen users have much luck utilizing weblish after installing a custom distro. Even though Devuan is a fork of Debian, our platform doesn't support it directly.
I've seen this most often when folks are running a Windows machine; once installed, it basically can't translate the foreign disk image for use via weblish, and a blank console output is what's left (even after it's fully booted). The results tend to be hit or miss with any custom distro, and additional features (i.e. Images or Backups) might not be compatible either.
You can always try updating grub to see if that gets the job done, but considering that Glish is working, you might be better suited to simply go sans weblish functionality.
Any change Linode might support Devuan in the future?
A whole bunch of more systemd silliness is on its way in 2023
@teknopaul writes:
A whole bunch of more systemd silliness is on its way in 2023
Three words… Open-/Net-/FreeBSD. They're not supported either but lish works (and no systemd).
-- sw
Alternatively if your only reason to switch to Devuan is systemd, you can replace systemd with sysvinit; this is quite simple (tested this morning on a fresh small instance of Debian 12).
apt-get install sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils sysv-rc-conf
Check /etc/inittab has been installed
** If not, 'cp /usr/share/sysvinit/inittab /etc/inittab'reboot
After the reboot, check access (I tested with weblish and SSH). You can then 'apt-get purge systemd' and reboot again to confirm the system works fine without systemd.
My experiences with getting rid of systemd that way have yielded mixed results. It may be okay for a desktop machine, but I have little confidence in this being reliable enough for a server.
What sort of problems have you encountered/anticipate? As a long-time sysvinit user (20+ years, with some servers running for over 10) I can't recall a single init-related problem (systemd, on the other hand, has bitten us more than once).
Could be it works for us because we mainly run long-term stable software; if running stuff that crashes and needs restarting often then something that automates that (systemd or other) may well be preferrable to creating a custom init script.
