Dear Init Freedom lovers, the Veteran Unix Admin collective salutes you!

Our project is called Devuan ⁽™⁾.

Devuan is spelled in Italian and it is pronounced just like "DevOne" in English.

A simple way to spell the url is "dev dash one dot org": both dev-one.org and dev-1.org will resolve.

Devuan aliases its releases using planet names as codenames.
The current stable is "Jessie" (planet nr.10464), testing is "Ascii" (planet nr.3568), unstable is "Ceres" (planet nr.1).

Devuan developers can be reached with an e-mail to .

OK, nevermind the names, but what's the plan?

Have you tried to opt-out of the systemd change in Debian⁽™⁾ and stay with sysvinit, or whatever other init you prefer? You will quickly notice that is not a matter of choosing packages and in fact Debian offers no choice.

We want freedom of choice, we want Init Freedom!

We are working towards a stable, production ready fork of Debian Jessie, free from the entangling web of dependencies imposed by systemd.

One can just migrate to Devuan by installing devuan-baseconf.deb which will re-configure the system with our source repository:

deb http://packages.devuan.org/merged jessie main

Beware this APT source is exclusive and cannot coexist with Debian's repositories.

Installers and virtual machine images are built daily via our continuous integration infrastructure and are available from our download zone.

A Vagrant box is also available, paste in your terminal:

mkdir devuan-vagrant && cd devuan-vagrant && cat << EOF > Vagrantfile
Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
  config.vm.box = "http://vagrant.devuan.org/devuan-jessie-amd64-alpha4.box"
  # for i386 use   http://vagrant.devuan.org/devuan-jessie-i386-alpha4.box
  config.ssh.username = "root"
  config.ssh.password = "devuan"
  config.vm.guest = :debian
  config.vm.synced_folder ".", "/vagrant", disabled: true
end
EOF
vagrant up
vagrant ssh

Vagrant will download and run our operating system as a headless VM automatically.

The current release series is ALPHA4 and despite this Devuan is already used with success in production by some of our developers and supporters.

Some systemd packages may still be present in this release series, but not running as init or as daemons in background. A knot of the entanglement is udev (now part of systemd!). So we look forward to a complete rewrite: vdev is written to be a minimalistic replacement daemon for udev.

We proudly support vdev as a new device manager for the Linux⁽™⁾ kernel.

Thanks! I really need that!

Cheers! Please consider a donation, it really encourages us to continue.

To stay up to date you can also follow DevuanOrg on Twitter.

If you want to participate in community debates, join the online web forum or the old-school DNG discussion mailinglist also available via Gmane.

Developers can also be reached via IRC on freenode channel #devuan.
If you just feel like chatting about all this, the generic discussion channel is #debianfork.

If you think of joining development, report a bug or share an insight, here is our code repository: all sources we modify are revisioned there, with issues, wiki, branches and pull requests.

What is your long term plan?

This is just the start of a process, as bold as it sounds to call it a fork of Debian. This exodus is ultimately being a relief for us, leading to the creation of a peaceful space for work we are well able to do. Believe it or not, there are many users and ICT professionals needing to opt-out from systemd and if you kept reading until here you probably are one. We are not alone!

Devuan aims to be a collective effort for a base distribution to suit our immediate needs, abiding to the long-term mission of protecting the freedom of its community of users and developers. Our priority is to enable diversity, interoperability and backward compatibility for upstream developers and downstream distributions willing to preserve their freedom.
Devuan is made necessary as we believe Debian has strayed from this mandate.

For the 1.0 release Devuan derives its own installer and package repositories from Debian Jessie, applying the necessary modifications to remove systemd. Our objective for 2015 is to make anyone using Debian Wheezy or Jessie able to update or switch to Devuan 1.0.

Devuan rebuilds an infrastructure similar to Debian, while taking the opportunity to innovate some of its practices. Here below a graph of what we have in place, working already for the ALPHA2 release series:

Devuan developers look at this project as a fresh new start for a community of interested people and do not intend to vexate any participant with hierarchy and bureaucracy beyond real cases of emergency. We are well conscious this is possible for us mostly because of starting small again; we will do our best to not repeat the same mistakes and we welcome all Debian Developers willing to join us on this route.

As Devuan developers, we make an effort to improve the relationship with both upstream and downstream and, particularly in this gestational phase we do our best to accomodate needs of those downstream distributions willing to adopt Devuan as base.

On the long-term Devuan will do its best to stay minimal and abide to the UNIX philosophy of "doing one thing and doing it well". Devuan perceives itself not as an end product, but a starting point for developers, a viable base for sysadmins and a stable tool for people who have experience of Debian. As such, Devuan will actively support and maintain the subset packages that require work to ensure the init freedom and freedom of choice in other subsystems, whilst still allowing use of the huge range of packages that are inherited from Debian otherwise untouched. Devuan will never impose choices to gain more efficiency at the cost of its users' freedom, rather than leave such concerns to the independent choices made by downstream developers.

Donate for our cause!