Greetings All,

By now I'm sure all with an interest in Devuan have seen the review of
Refracta that I wrote for DistroWatch. A few of you knew in advance that I
was working on this article, and sent me technical tips and advice before
it was published. Thank you for this assistance - indeed, it was essential,
my story would have been a hopeless muddle without it. Needless to say,
fsmithred was foremost among my contacts, but a few others also contributed
their expertise, and I am grateful for the help.

As the title of this thread indicates, a final release of Devuan 1.0 is on
my mind. The reason why Devuan hasn't been reviewed yet is because it's
still only available as a beta version. When the much anticipated final
release makes its debut, it will undoubtedly be reviewed on DistroWatch,
and there is a better-than-even chance that I'll be the one to write the
story.

As I hinted in my Refracta article, the main gotcha that Devuan suffers
from right now is its installer. Once installed, the operating system is
actually rock-solid. Indeed, I think it's fair to say that Devuan in its
current state could honestly call itself a "stable release"...if the
installer gets fixed.

Not that I could do better, mind you. I fully appreciate how much work it
is to write a program that performs flawlessly on everyone's computer, no
matter what stupid things the end-user does. But this is a problem that
just has to get fixed or else the world will end, so let's take a look at
the details...

Specifically, the problem with the installer is that it forces you to do a
network install even if you've downloaded and burned the bulky 4GB DVD ISO.
My experience is that the installation takes over an hour, but YMMV due to
network speed. A lot of people don't have that much patience, but more
problematic is that in the middle of the process, it's usual to receive an
error message that the installation failed (I believe this is caused by
network timeout, but I'm not sure).

Ironically, if you ignore the threatening error message and just reissue
the appropriate command, the installer will pick up where it left off and
successfully compete the routine. So this "fatal error" is not really
fatal, as long as you don't let yourself be intimidated.

Unfortunately, upon seeing the "installation failed" error message, many
potential converts to Devuan are convinced that the Department of Homeland
Security has learned of their disloyalty to systemd, thus they WILL BE
PUNISHED unless they immediately repent and burn their Devuan CD.

Of course, I'm exaggerating. It's ridiculous to believe that the Department
of Homeland Security knows what you're doing. Just as long as you wear your
tinfoil hat at all times, their spy satellites won't be able to read your
thoughts. So there's no reason to be paranoid.

Sorry I'm starting to ramble. It could be those chemtrails are starting to
affect me, or maybe the nano-robots in the vaccinations. Anyway, I hope you
all get my point. No, not the point that I should be committed, but rather
that the installer needs some attention. I'm sorry to say that I don't have
the technical skills to fix it myself, but I'm hoping that doing so won't
be too onerous, and that it can be done in the near future. I swear that
once the Devuan 1.0 final release is in my hot little hands, I will
immediately pounce upon it and write the review.

OK, I'll go now.

cheers,
Robert