how to switch a Debian buster system from systemd to sys-v init
Purely out of curiosity, I'd like to see what's involved in switching a Debian buster system from systemd to sysv init. Please, I don't want to restart or get involved in any of the existing systemd/sysv flame wars. I'm *just curious* to see if it would work?
First of all, is this even possible?
Second, has anyone done it? If so, how did you do it? Here's what I've discovered so far:
Step zero: I fired up a virtual machine and installed stock-out-of-the-box Debian buster with mate on it. I didn't want to have my experiments break any of my production machines! Everything that follows is happening on the VM.
Step one: I searched for packages with "sysv" in their names that weren't already installed. Then I looked for one that said it conflicted with systemd. I settled on sysvinit-core. The rival was sysv-rc (though I'm sure there were others I could have tried). The reason I rejected sysv-rc is that it does not seem to conflict with systemd. Am I wrong in assuming that this (conflicting with systemd) is a requirement for something that will replace systemd?
Step two: But when I try "apt install sysvinit-core" it wants to delete lots of stuff that seem to have nothing to do with systemd at all. For example it wants to remove a bunch of libreoffice packages, and some mate packages, and a bunch of xserver-xorg packages. More precisely it says they are no longer needed and should be deleted by using "apt autoremove". Somehow that doesn't seem right to me. I’m pretty sure I need those packages.
Step three: I tried “apt install sysvinit-core sysvinit-utils” and let it go ahead and delete all the stuff it wanted to. Then I rebooted the system and it came up running the sysv init, but there was a long pause during the boot process while it was trying to start dbus. This eventually timed out and continued and gave me a “login:” prompt, but now I get frequent pauses while it seems to be looking for a non-existent bus daemon.
Anybody got any thoughts?
Thanks for any help you can offer!
Rick
PS: It would be really cool (TM) if the Debian installer offered sysv as an option!
PPS: I googled a bit and found a Devuan website[1] that had instructions for getting a small number of .deb packages from the Devuan ascii repo and using them to replace the corresponding packages from Debian, but it said to start with Debian stretch, not buster. It also pointed out that gnome (and presumably most/all of the other of the other desktop managers) in Debian nowadays explicitly depend on systemd, so it’s best done on a pure headless server configuration. This explains why sysvinit-core wanted to delete all the stuff like server-xorg and libreoffice.
I’d prefer a solution that was pure Debian (i.e. without being dependent on stuff from Devuan[2]) even if it meant being restricted to a headless server config.
[1] https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-replace-systemd-with-sysv-init-on-debian-linux
[2] Don’t take me wrong, I am very supportive of Devuan. I even have a couple of systems that run it in production, but it does tend to drag a bit behind Debian on bug-fixes and latest-feature updates. This is understandable: it’s a much smaller project than Debian.
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