Migrate from Debian Trixie to Excalibur

The instructions below are only for migrating from Debian Trixie to Devuan Excalibur. Migrating from a fresher, less customized Debian is likely to be less troublesome. Depending on your setup, significant issues may arise during the process so as always, proceed with caution and backup your data before proceeding.

Scripts

In addition, a script is available which partially automates the process:

• farmatito's script to migrate standard Debian desktop installations to Devuan

Manual instructions

The first step is to change /etc/apt/sources.list to point to the Excalibur repositories.

root@debian:~# editor /etc/apt/sources.list

Modify sources.list to look like the one provided. Comment out all other lines.

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur main
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-updates main
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-security main
#deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-backports main

Now update the package lists from the Excalibur repositories.

root@debian:~# apt-get update --allow-insecure-repositories

The Devuan keyring should now be installed so that the repository and packages can be authenticated.

root@debian:~# apt-get install devuan-keyring --allow-unauthenticated

Update the package lists again so that the repositories and packages are authenticated.

root@debian:~# apt-get update

Upgrade the installed packages to the latest versions. Note that this does not complete the migration.

root@debian:~# apt-get upgrade (be careful not to use dist-upgrade here)

Once this is done eudev needs to be installed. Note that if Gnome is installed it will be removed by this command, but can be installed again after the migration.

root@debian:~# apt-get install eudev sysvinit-core systemd-sysv- --allow-remove-essential

The last command may cause package breaks but they will be resolved as part of the migration process.

root@debian:~# apt-get -f install

A reboot is required to change sysvinit to pid1.

root@debian:~# reboot

Next, it is necessary to install elogind, which will remove systemd.

root@debian:~# apt-get -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-overwrite" install elogind

Now perform the migration proper.

root@debian:~# apt-get dist-upgrade

Now the migration to Devuan is done, systemd related packages can be removed.

root@devuan:~# apt-get purge systemd libnss-systemd

If the required desktop is not already installed, install it now. The default in Devuan is XFCE.

root@devuan:~# apt-get install task-xfce-desktop

or

root@devuan:~# apt-get install task-gnome-desktop

Now remove any packages orphaned by the migration process, and any unusable archives left over from the previous Debian installation.

root@devuan:~# apt-get autoremove --purge
root@devuan:~# apt-get autoclean

Finally, if running either of the commands lsb_release -a or cat /etc/os-release still shows evidence of the former Debian install, then running the following command should update the information to show Devuan as expected.

root@devuan:~# apt-get install base-files/excalibur

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