Hi all, Martin's right: Long term, your best way to get no-systemd Debian is to use Devuan, and Devuan's a very worthwhile community to join and contribute to. In my opinion, Devuan got most of the smart people actually capable of traversing the Init landscape, leaving a technological void in the Debian community.
Join the Devuan mailing list. Get your feet wet. But of course Devuan is alpha test software right now, and you need your no-systemd Debian today, not in a few months when Devuan supercedes Debian. Systemd-free Jessie quite doable, with various combinations of the following softwares: * Suckless Init * LittKit * s6 *or* daemontools-encore * Epoch * runit The preceding inits are all simple enough to have been written by one person, and they're all simple enough for a mere mortal to understand how they work, not just their cockpit controls. None of the preceding requires the monstrosity init scripts required by sysvinit and OpenRC. Erwin, you mentioned needing to get your computer booted to ssh readiness, which I assume implies a serial tty plus sshd in the background, from which someone can ssh log in as root (or as another user and then su -). Which in turn requires that /etc is readable. My first thought on that would be to boot Suckless Init, which is PID1 and only PID1, with no package management. Suckless Init passes off control to /bin/rc.init, which gets /etc readable, then calls LittKit plus daemontools-encore or s6 to perform process management tasks. The initial-running service of s6 or daemontools-encore (I'll just say s6 to mean either from now on) makes /etc readable, runs a serial getty and sshd. Getting /etc readable might not be as hard as you think. I'll bet that your initramfs, which happens *before* any stage of what we all speak of as init, loads the drivers for encrypted partitions. Then you come in via ssh, log in as root, and do the following LittKit command: lk_runsvc real_init In the preceding, real_init is a s6 service that brings up all the other services, in the order you want them to come up. Zebediah, you asked "What is the correct way to work towards not having systemd be installed by default in stretch?" I'm almost positive that will never happen. Most of us who wanted that, and more importantly most of us who were capable of making it happen, have gone elsewhere: Many to Devuan. The current vestiges of Debian are as pro-systemd as Fedora or Arch: Any mention of alternatives is considered trolling, as you've seen in this thread. Which doesn't mean you can't boot to an alternate init. Just go extra-distro, sans package manager, and install the very simple init software available. You could use Epoch as your init: That's probably easiest, and gets rid of the most systemd baggage. Be sure to stop and restart dbus to run it without all the systemd accoutraments. Besides Epoch, you could use runit, s6, or s6+LittKit+SucklessInit. You have many, many choices. I doubt you'll get rid of every vestige of systemd. Whatever their motivation, the fact is that the systemd people have built thick connections to most software outside of anything traditionally thought of as an init system, and they continue to build more of these on a weekly basis. They've also taken over many small pieces of independent system software, udev for example, and welded them tightly and inextricably to systemd. And don't forget the "upstreams", who have delightedly followed the Pied Poettering into the land of systemd. Running Gnome without any vestiges of systemd, on Jessie, would take hours or days of work, if it's doable at all. Xfce is now highly connected to systemd on most distros. LXDE and Openbox are still independent, and I hope they stay that way. But if they don't, there are always dwm, jwm, and several others who have absolutely no desire to unite with "big software". When using any of the simpler inits that I suggest, use /bin/bash as a periscope. For instance, if you set init=/bin/bash within grub or lilo, you'll see the system exactly as your initramfs leaves it. You can see whether /etc is readable. You can see which mounts are in effect, and whether they're read-write. As you get earlier parts of init to work the way you want, you can drop to /bin/bash later, until you get the whole thing running. Is it easy? No. But once you're done, you'll know exactly how your system boots up, and you'll be able to exactly govern your bootup. And in init discussions like the one currently going on Debian-User, you'll be the smartest person in the room. I'd recommend doing your first init experimentation on a Virtual Machine (VM), because reboot cycles are much quicker, you can back up in minutes, and you can incrementally improve. Later, when everything works on a VM, load it on bare metal and get that to work. Here are URLs for some of the software I've mentioned: Suckless Init: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=suckless+init LittKit: http://troubleshooters.com/projects/littkit/ daemontools-encore: http://untroubled.org/daemontools-encore/ s6: http://www.skarnet.org/software/s6/ runit: http://smarden.org/runit/ Epoch: http://universe2.us/epoch.html And here are a couple links with guidance for alternative inits: Manjaro experiments: http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/init/manjaro_experiments.htm Suckless Init plus daemontools-encore: http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/diy/suckless_init_on_plop.htm The material from the preceding two links sounds difficult, but the thing is, once you've mastered it, you understand, to the bottom of your soul, what init is and does, and you understand exactly how to start up your computer exactly your way. And please remember, Devuan gets closer to production quality every day. Someday you won't have to jump through these hoops. HTH, SteveT Steve Litt June 2015 featured book: The Key to Everyday Excellence http://www.troubleshooters.com/key _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
