The Devuan team has announced the immediate availability of Devuan 2.0 beta for testing. This release code named ASCII is made in compatible with Debian 9.x Stretch and ensures safe update path from Debian 8.x Jessy and Debian 9.x Stretch.
The Devuan 2.0 Alpha was around for almost two years and is working smoothly on thousands of desktops and servers. The community has done extensive testing on Devuan 2.0 alpha image and has fixed most of the issues. Now, the community believes it is time for an open assessment and hence the beta release is made available for the public. Once the community incorporates the feedback received from external contributors, this branch will be declared as stable and the final image will be released.
The Devuan 2.0 Alpha was around for almost two years and is working smoothly on thousands of desktops and servers. The community has done extensive testing on Devuan 2.0 alpha image and has fixed most of the issues. Now, the community believes it is time for an open assessment and hence the beta release is made available for the public. Once the community incorporates the feedback received from external contributors, this branch will be declared as stable and the final image will be released.
What is Devuan?
Well. We're talking about Devuan 2.0 beta release for a while now. For those who have not heard about Devuan earlier, Devuan is a fork of Debian without systemd - the init program used in Debian and it's derivatives. Since the init program while be running in background for the entire time, Devuan team don't want to include a heavier program like systemd. With this mission, Devuan has released it's first version from Debian Jessy has provided a smooth update path from Jessy and it's predecessor Wheezy.
When Devuan 2.0 is getting released?
Unlike many other main stream distributions, Devuan does not follow a strict schedule. The team tries to release the operating system once it is ready. The beta release is made available now for testing. Once it is tested by the open community, most of the reported bugs will be fixed. Once all bugs are fixed, it will be released to the community as a stable edition.What are various update paths planned?
Devuan is made in compatible with Debian 9.x Stretch. The team is already providing safe update path from Debian 8.x Jessy and Debian 9.x Stretch to the Devuan 2.0 ASCII release. And of course, there will be update path from Devuan 1.0 also.What are new features in Devuan 2.0 ASCII?
This is going to be most interesting part of any release. Quoting from official release announcement, following are major highlights in Devuan 2.0 ASCII beta release.
For further information on Devuan 2.0 ASCII beta released, see original announcement made by Devuan team.
- OpenRC is installable using the expert install path (thanks Maemo Leste!)
- eudev has replaced systemd-udev (thanks Gentoo!)
- elogind has been added as an alternative to consolekit (thanks Gentoo!)
- Desktop users can choose among fully functional XFCE (Default), KDE, Cinnamon, LXQT, MATE, and LXDE desktops
- CLI-oriented users can select the "Console productivity" task that installs a fully-featured set of console-based utils and tools.
- A .vdi disk image is now provided for use with VirtualBox.
- ARM board kernels have been updated to 4.14 and 4.15 for most boards.