> On 9 Dec 2024, at 18:06, nick@??? wrote:
>
> Hi crew,

…

> - Cannot set the system date through the GUI. Options to set the date seem to be missing in the date dialog, not sure why, I will have to do a comparison with a functioning Mint machine to learn more. As a workaround I temporarily set the date from the command-line using: sudo date --set="something" ... but the setting does not persist beyond the next boot. When it boots with wrong clock the kids cannot use the computer as it won't connect to any https sites.

Have you checked the CMOS battery? If that is dead then the clock won’t persist after power is turned off.

Do you run any NTP daemon eg. chrony / ntpsec / openntpd to keep time synchronised while the system is running? It should suffice to just `apt install chrony` and let it run with the default configured NTP pool servers.

Another alternative might be running `ntpdate` (ntpsec-ntpdate package) on each system startup to run a single NTP update if you don’t want to run a full ntp daemon.

> So today I started to do some work with the system and the first thing I needed to do was install KiCAD. I need at least version 8.0 to continue working on the projects I was doing on my old laptop. So I needed the PPA version. But using Ubuntu PPAs is problematic on debian/devuan. As I don't want to build KiCAD from source (which would be a very lengthy process involving hundreds of dependencies) what I ended up doing was as follows:
>
> - Try different Ubuntu base versions until I get something that would nearly install. I started with Oracular (24.10) but it refused to install KiCAD with a long list of unmet dependencies, mainly about package versions not new enough. So I tried Noble (24.04) and it seemed about the same. But the list got shorter with Mantic (23.10) and the sweet spot seemed to be Jammy (23.04). If I went back further then the list started to get longer again.
>
> - Grab the missing dependencies from Ubuntu package archive, it turned out that I needed the following dpkg's:
> libgit2-1.1_1.1.0+dfsg.1-4.1ubuntu0.1_amd64.deb
> libmpdec3_2.5.1-2build2_amd64.deb
> libpython3.10_3.10.12-1~22.04.7_amd64.deb
> libpython3.10-minimal_3.10.12-1~22.04.7_amd64.deb
> libpython3.10-stdlib_3.10.12-1~22.04.7_amd64.deb
>
> - With these installed, apt --fix-broken install was willing to set everything up I could then proceed to install KiCAD. It worked until I entered one of the editors when it complained it could not get the wxpython version and said Python plugins will not be available. I don't think that's a dealbreaker for the time being.

As Dan also mentioned, kicad is available in Debian/Devuan backports repository. This is not enabled by default so you will need to configure it.

https://www.devuan.org/os/packages

If you find the Debian/Devuan backports package is not working and need to run in Ubuntu and have hardware virtualisation support, you could try installing Ubuntu inside a KVM virtual machine and run it from there. I have previously used virt-manager as a decent virtual machine GUI along with `qemu-guest-agent` inside the linux guest VM. This would certainly be preferable than attempting to cross-install Ubuntu deb packages into Devuan.

The trouble with cross-installing deb packages is that Ubuntu and Debian/Devuan releases do not occur at the same time so packages end up being compiled against different library versions that don’t exist in the other distro’s package archives.

> Along the way I also had some problems trying to install the keyring for the PPA, I've encountered issues before on other distro's due to how apt-key is supposedly deprecated and none of the incantations that are meant to replace it seem to do the trick for me. In my case it was complaining about things like a missing dirmngr, I thought this might be a devuan issue because it sounds like a server that listens on a socket and there was no mention of it in /etc/init.d, but a bit more reading convinced me that it's an internal gpg issue since it's supposed to launch the daemon by itself (but apparently didn't do so). Eventually I gave up and used apt-key and that worked but now I get warnings all over the place. Again, not really a dealbreaker for the time being.

For missing dirmngr, you might have only the minimal `gpg` package installed instead of the full `gnupg`.

As for apt-key deprecation, there are definitely some good changes there. Debian (and therefore also Devuan) is moving away from trusting all keys by default for every configured apt source. The `apt-key` command will be removed from Debian 13/Devuan 6 onwards.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/dont-use-apt-key/ <https://blog.cloudflare.com/dont-use-apt-key/> is a good read for why the changes are necessary.

Packages that install a key file are expected to put them under `/usr/share/keyrings` while users can put extra keys under `/etc/apt/keyrings`. You then reference that key file from the sources.list.d/repo.list or DEB822 repo.sources configuration files so that each apt repository is only trusted by a specific key file.

eg. Postgresql upstream pgdg.sources:

Types: deb
URIs: https://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt
Suites: bookworm-pgdg
Components: main
Signed-By: /usr/share/postgresql-common/pgdg/apt.postgresql.org.gpg


opentofu.list:

deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/opentofu.gpg,/etc/apt/keyrings/opentofu-repo.gpg] https://packages.opentofu.org/opentofu/tofu/any/ any main

> Overall I was feeling quite discouraged today, but I did persevere and after a lot of time spent, I got most of the way to where I need to go. So I'm glad I didn't throw in the towel and install Mint again. But I must say that for me, systemd is a massive problem on a server but it's only a major annoyance on a desktop machine. It does seem possible that I might need to return to a systemd-based desktop in the future for the sake of productivity. But this would be violating a principle, so I'm going to do everything possible not to go there.
>
> Any thoughts from the list?
>
> kind regards, Nick

Hope this helps a bit.

Tom