Dear Init Freedom Lovers,

Once again the Veteran Unix Admins salute you!

Our April 2017 gift to you is the long-awaited release of Devuan
Jessie stable release candidate (1.0.0-RC). If all goes as planned,
this will be our first Devuan stable release and our first long term
support (LTS) release as well.

Two and a half years have passed since our initial Debianfork
declaration (https://devuan.org/os/debian-fork/) and not even one year
since our first beta release
(http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/devuan-beta-release).

This Devuan Jessie release candidate is as close as we can get to a
"long term support" universal base distribution free from systemd, in
the original spirit of Debian.

The final Devuan Jessie release will follow shortly and then we will
turn our attention to "Ascii", the current testing branch.

We wish to thank all of you for the incredible support given to this
development effort, and for engaging in the process of making Devuan a
useful and reliable base distro, as well as a pleasant, cooperative
community.


# What has improved in Devuan Jessie

The wifi autodetection problems present in the beta release series
have been fixed.

The problem that prevented samba from installing has been fixed.

Devuan now directly provides different base distribution flavours:
desktop-live (finally the purpy experience), embedded, minimal-live
and installer-iso.

Devuan's Simple Distro Kit (SDK) is rapidly approaching maturity, with
a full set of scripts and documentation to roll your own Devuan-based
distro in any flavor. (https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=551)

The Refracta scripts are now included in Devuan, which makes it easy
to toast a new live distro from the state of a running one.

Devuan's infrastructure is now powered by the 'debbugs' bug tracking
system originally written by Ian Jackson, and the 'reportbug' tool
works as expected.

Package maintenance has been demystified and partially automated with
d1h - the Devuan packaging helper
(https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=549) - which simplifies the
task of interacting with the Devuan continuous integration pipeline
and makes it easier for developers to package their projects for
Devuan correctly. Please consider rolling up your sleeves and joining
the development team!

ARM support has improved: Devuan now provides base SD card images for
11 different hardware platforms: raspi1, raspi2, raspi3, chromeacer,
chromeveyron, cubieboard2, cubietruck, lime2, micro, N900,
odroidxu. When applicable (sunxi boards) ARM images are powered by
mainline 4.10.y Linux kernels.

# Downloads

Official Devuan images are distributed via the website
(https://files.devuan.org/devuan_jessie_rc/)

To ease the load on our bandwidth we kindly ask you to use one of the
following mirrors:

- http://mirror.leaseweb.com/devuan
- http://devuan.ksx4system.net
- http://tux.rainside.sk/devuan
- http://nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/devuan
- http://devuan.c3l.lu
- http://neo900.files.dev-1.org
- http://devuan.4isp.it
- http://mirror.math.princeton.edu/pub/devuan/
- http://devuan.mirror.k0nsl.org/
- ftp://mirror.leaseweb.com/devuan
- ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/devuan

All files offered for download come with their SHA256 hash to check
the integrity (either in the SHA256SUMS or in the .sha files) and with
a cryptographic signature made using GnuPG by one of the Devuan
developers in charge of the build, included as .asc file.

An understanding of Devuan's script-friendly file naming scheme and
directory structure will help you find what you
need. (https://devuan.org/os/filenaming)

# Related projects

Here is a short list of projects which use Devuan as a base OS for
their research and development:

Dowse - the IoT awareness Hub which won the ISOC NL Innovation prize
    2016 is based on Devuan and just released its 1.0 beta:
    https://dowse.eu

DECODE - An R&D project on data sovereignty and blockchain technology
    financed with 5M EUR by the EU Commission is based on Devuan:
    http://decocodeproject.eu

heads - a live distro focused on privacy, security, and freedoms,
    experimenting with Devuan Ascii, and having a workshop @
    http://2017.rmll.info: https://heads.dyne.org

## Distributions based on Devuan

In chronological order of appearance:

- Gnuinos <http://gnuinos.org> (linux-libre 100% free, GNU review pending)
- Refracta <http://www.ibiblio.org/refracta>
- Exe GNU/Linux <http://exegnulinux.net>
- Nelum-dev1 <https://sourceforge.net/projects/nelum-dev1>
- Star <https://sourceforge.net/projects/linnix>
- heads <https://heads.dyne.org> (linux-libre 100% free, GNU review pending)
- good-life-linux <https://sourceforge.net/projects/good-life-linux/>
- Crowz <https://sourceforge.net/projects/crowz>

# Upgrade

Devuan can be adopted as a flawless upgrade path from both Debian
Wheezy and Jessie. This is a main goal for the Devuan Jessie stable
release and has proven to be a very stable operation every time it has
been performed. Detailed installation and upgrade instructions are
available including translations
(https://devuan.org/os/documentation/dev1fanboy/).

The Devuan Apt package repositories are:
```
deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged jessie main
deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged jessie-updates main
deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged jessie-security main
```
We provide access to our package repository also via Tor:
```
deb tor+http://devuanfwojg73k6r.onion/merged jessie main
deb tor+http://devuanfwojg73k6r.onion/merged jessie-updates main
deb tor+http://devuanfwojg73k6r.onion/merged jessie-security main
```

After **replacing** Debian's package sources with the ones above, run:
```
apt-get update
apt-get install devuan-keyring
apt-get dist-upgrade
```

Then proceed with a reboot, which will keep `sysvinit` as init or
revert to it in case the machine was running Debian Jessie.

Additional package repositories are available, but considered
experimental:

```
deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged jessie-backports main
deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged jessie-proposed-updates main
deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/devuan jessie-proposed main
deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/devuan experimental main
```
# Growing support

More and more users are installing/upgrading Devuan on a daily
basis. This expanded user-base will help to fine tune the final Jessie
release.

Please report bugs to our Bug Tracking System (BTS)
(https://bugs.devuan.org/) using the reportbug tool available in the
repos or directly by email.

As our journey led by world-class experts, supporters, enthusiasts and
donors continues, we acknowledge with heartfelt thanks and
appreciation every one of you.

Our distrowatch page is on http://distrowatch.com/devuan (and we are
very proud of it! thanks Distrowatch for all the early support!)


# Community

Devuan's web forum is on https://dev1galaxy.org

IRC channels: #devuan #debianfork #devuan-dev #devuan-www #devuan-fr
and perhaps even more on freenode.net

Announce mailinglist (low traffic, only release announcements)
https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devuan-announce

Discussion mailinglist (high volume traffic)
https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

# Init Freedom

Devuan is about choice. We think people should be able to choose
whether to use a GNU+Linux system with or without systemd.

Devuan decided to fork not only the base distribution, but also its
governance, because Debian has made it difficult to avoid systemd as
init, entangling the system with unnecessary dependencies. We
encourage potential Devuan users who wish to install systemd to use
Debian's installer, Debian's packages and Debian's mailing lists, all
available directly from Debian's mirrors.

Devuan is the Debian that was and could have been. Our goal is to
provide a viable and sustainable alternative. It is a new path,
nurtured with your help and support.

To support the Devuan project: https://devuan.org/donate

happy hacking ;^)