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Devuan 4 Chimaera Release Notes

Index

  • Introduction
  • New in this Release
  • Getting Devuan 4 Chimaera
  • Upgrading to Devuan 4 Chimaera
  • Notes on Specific Packages and Issues
    • exim
    • su
    • podman
    • wicd
    • Blank Display on Ryzen and other recent AMD CPUs
    • Xfce missing application menu icons
  • Devuan Package Repositories
  • Non-free firmware
  • Devuan package information pages
  • Reporting bugs

Introduction

This document includes technical notes relevant to Devuan 4 Chimaera.

Devuan 4 Chimaera is based on Debian 11 Bullseye. Much of the information in Debian's Release Notes is relevant and useful. They should be consulted alongside this document.

More information and support on specific issues can be obtained by:

New in this Release

Accessibility

The installer for Devuan 4 Chimaera is based on the Debian 11 installer. This means that the procedures described on Debian's wiki accessibility page for starting the Debian installer with software speech, hardware speech synthesizer or a refreshable braille display, also apply to the Devuan installer.

New in Devuan 4 Chimaera is the ability to install a desktop environment without also installing pulseaudio in the installed system. This enables speech synthesis in both a graphical and console session at the same time. This configuration is created by the task-speech-accessibility and devuan-speech-dispatcher-config-override packages which are installed by default when the "Install with Speech Synthesis" option ("s <enter>" on BIOS systems, "s" on UEFI systems at the boot prompt) is selected.

If you are installing a console only system and do not require this compatibility you may choose to disable task-speech-accessibility which will prevent installing orca with its graphical dependencies.

Note that slim (the default Display Manager for xfce) is not accessible. Be sure to install lightdm or gdm3 if you require an accessible Display Manager.

Desktops and Display Managers

Improved support for elogind means that virtually all desktops[1] and display managers in Debian are now also available in Devuan. Newly available display managers in Devuan 4 Chimaera include gdm3 and sddm. The lxde desktop is also a new addition.

[1] parl requires systemd and is not available.

Getting Devuan 4 Chimaera

Devuan 4 Chimaera is available for i386, amd64, armel, armhf, arm64 and ppc64el architectures.

Installer isos and live CDs for i386 and amd64 are available for download at http://files.devuan.org/devuan_chimaera/.

Mini isos and other specialist installation media for all release architectures are available from http://deb.devuan.org/devuan/dists/chimaera/main/installer-{ARCH}/current/images/.

Please consider using one of the many mirrors, listed at https://devuan.org/get-devuan.

Detailed instructions on how to use each image are available in the corresponding README.txt file. The SHA256SUMS of each set of images is signed by the developer in charge of the build. The fingerprints of GPG keys of all Devuan developers are listed at https://devuan.org/os/team.

In order to check that the images you downloaded are genuine and not corrupted, you should:

  • download the image(s)

  • download the corresponding SHA256SUMS and SHA256SUMS.asc files in the same folder

  • verify the checksums by running:

    sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS

    (it could complain about missing files, but should show an "OK" close to the images you have actually downloaded)

  • verify the signature running:

    gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring ./devuan-devs.gpg --verify SHA256SUMS.asc

    (assuming that you have put the GPG keys in the keyring named devuan-devs.gpg. YMMV)

The devuan-devs.gpg keyring is provided only for convenience. The most correct procedure to verify that the signatures are authentic is by downloading the relevant public keys from a trusted keyserver, double-check that the fingerprint of the key matches that of the developer reported on https://devuan.org/os/team and then use that key for verification.

Docker images

Unofficial docker images for all Devuan releases including Devuan 4 Chimaera are also available. They are prepared and supported by paddy-hack and jaromil and are updated daily.

Related documentation is also available:

Upgrading to Devuan 4 Chimaera

Direct and easy upgrade path from Devuan Chimaera and migration path from Debian Bullseye to Devuan 4 Chimaera are available at https://devuan.org/os/install.

If you are already on Chimaera, run this command to get to the current release version:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade

Notes on Specific Packages and Issues

exim 4.94

Please consider the version of exim in Devuan 4 Chimaera a major exim upgrade. It introduces the concept of tainted data read from untrusted sources, like e.g. message sender or recipient. This tainted data (e.g. $local_part or $domain) cannot be used among other things as a file or directory name or command name.

This will break configurations which are not updated accordingly. Old Debian exim configuration files also will not work unmodified; the new configuration needs to be installed with local modifications merged in.

Typical nonworking examples include:

  • Delivery to /var/mail/$local_part.

    Use $local_part_data in combination with check_local_user.

  • Using

    data = ${lookup{$local_part}lsearch{/some/path/$domain/aliases}}

    instead of

    data = ${lookup{$local_part}lsearch{/some/path/$domain_data/aliases}}

    for a virtual domain alias file.

The basic strategy for dealing with this change is to use the result of a lookup in further processing instead of the original (remote provided) value.

To ease upgrading there is a new main configuration option to temporarily downgrade taint errors to warnings, letting the old configuration work with the newer exim. To make use of this feature add

.ifdef _OPT_MAIN_ALLOW_INSECURE_TAINTED_DATA
 allow_insecure_tainted_data = yes
.endif

to the exim configuration (e.g. to /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.localmacros) before upgrading and check the logfile for taint warnings. This is a temporary workaround which is already marked for removal on introduction.

su

The behaviour of su changed in Devuan 3 Beowulf. These changes persist in Devuan 4 Chimaera. Use su - to get root's path or use the full path to commands if you use only su. See the following for more information:

podman

Debian's podman package only works on Devuan after reconfiguration. The easiest way to achieve this is to install the debian-podman-config-override package which sets suitable defaults for Devuan systems.

wicd

Wicd is no longer available in Devuan 4 Chimaera having been removed from Debian Bullseye because of it's dependency on python2 which is now obsolete.

Alternative network managers are available:

  • connman (default for lxde)
  • network-manager (default for xfce, mate, cinnamon and kde via plasma-nm)
  • cmst (default for lxqt)
  • ifupdown (configuration guide here or locally on the installer isos)

Blank Display on Ryzen and other recent AMD CPUs

If you have a Ryzen or other new AMD CPUs and find that the system boots to black screen, installation of the firmware-amd-graphics package from the non-free repository is required to fix the issue.

Xfce missing application menu icons

If, after upgrading from Devuan 3 Beowulf, Xfce application menu icons are missing, run the command

xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Gtk/MenuImages -t bool -s true --create

which will recreate the required default configuration.

Further information: https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=15085.

Devuan Package Repositories

Thanks to the support of many volunteers and donors, Devuan has a network of package repository mirrors. The mirror network is accessible using the FQDN deb.devuan.org.

Starting from Devuan 2.0 ASCII, users should exclusively use deb.devuan.org in their sources.list file, e.g.:

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged chimaera main
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged chimaera-security main
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged chimaera-updates main
deb http://deb.devuan.org/devuan chimaera-proposed main

Along with the above URLs, the repositories are also accessible using the Tor network, by using our hidden service address:

deb tor+http://devuanfwojg73k6r.onion/merged chimaera main
deb tor+http://devuanfwojg73k6r.onion/merged chimaera-security main
deb tor+http://devuanfwojg73k6r.onion/merged chimaera-updates main
deb tor+http://devuanfwojg73k6r.onion/devuan chimaera-proposed main

More information is available at https://devuan.org/os/packages.

All the mirrors contain the full Devuan package repository (all the Devuan releases and all the suites). They are synced every 30 minutes from the main Devuan package repository (pkgmaster.devuan.org) and are continuously checked for sanity, integrity, and consistency. The package repository network is accessed through a DNS Round-Robin.

The updated list of mirrors belonging to the network is available at http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/mirror_list.txt.

Users could also opt for directly accessing one of the mirrors in that list using the corresponding BaseURL.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The package mirrors at deb.devuan.org are signed with the following GPG key:

pub   rsa4096 2017-09-04 [SC] [expires: 2022-09-03]
      E032601B7CA10BC3EA53FA81BB23C00C61FC752C
uid  [ unknown] Devuan Repository (Amprolla3 on Nemesis
              <repository@devuan.org>)
sub   rsa4096 2017-09-04 [E] [expires: 2022-09-03]

The key is included in the devuan-keyring package. In order to use deb.devuan.org, you must have devuan-keyring_2017.10.03 or higher.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Devuan has discontinued the original set of Devuan mirrors formerly available at auto.mirror.devuan.org and {CC}.mirror.devuan.org. As a consequence, users should only use the new set of mirrors via deb.devuan.org.

Non-free firmware

All Devuan 4 Chimaera installation media make non-free firmware packages available at install time. In the majority of the cases, these packages are needed (and will be installed) only if your hardware (usually wifi adapter) requires them. It is possible to avoid the automatic installation and loading of needed non-free firmware by choosing the "Expert install" option in the installation menu.

Devuan 4 Chimaera desktop-live and minimal-live images come with non-free firmware packages pre-installed. You have the option of removing those non-free firmware packages from the desktop-live and minimal-live after boot, using the remove_firmware.sh script available under /root.

Devuan package information pages

Devuan provides a service to display information about all the packages available in Devuan. This can be accessed at https://pkginfo.devuan.org.

It is possible to search for package names matching a set of keywords, and to visualise the description, dependencies, suggestions and recommendations of each package.

Reporting bugs

No piece of software is perfect. And acknowledging this fact is the first step towards improving our software base.

Devuan strongly believes in the cooperation of the community to find, report and solve issues. If you think you have found a bug in a Devuan package, please report it to https://bugs.devuan.org.

The procedure to report bugs is quite simple: install and run reportbug, a tool that will help you compiling the bug report and including any relevant information for the maintainers.

reportbug assumes than you have a properly configured Mail User Agent that can send emails (and that it knows about). If this is not the case, you can still prepare your bug report with reportbug, save it (by default reportbug will save the report under /tmp), and then use it as a template for an email to submit@bugs.devuan.org.

(NOTE: Devuan does not provide an open SMTP relay for reportbug yet. If you don't know what this is about, you can safely ignore this information).

When the bug report is processed, you will receive an email confirmation indicating the number associated to the report.

Before reporting a bug, please check whether the very same problem has been already experienced and reported by other users.

In general, issues with Devuan's own forked packages should be reported to Devuan's BTS. For unforked packages, bugs should usually be fixed in Debian. reportbug can report issues directly to Debian's BTS by using the -B debian option.