On 2020-03-22 at 21:21, Marc Shapiro wrote: > Supposedly, one can install/upgrade to Buster while maintaining sysv > as init. Or has this changed. Over the past several months I have > been attempting to upgrade to Buster, but I have been completely > unsuccessful. > > Has anyone managed to upgrade to Buster without installing systemd, > or jumping through hoops that would drive a lion tamer mad? > > I made a copy of all of my partitions so that I could do the upgrade > while maintaining Stretch in case something went wrong. I'm glad > that I did! > > The first time that I tried this, I actually managed to upgrade to > Buster and have everything appear to work. Then I realized that I > had only done an "upgrade" but not a "full-upgrade". After that, X > would not start. I have, as I said, spent several months trying to > get X working on Buster without systemd. I have not been successful. > None of my later attempts ever got a working Buster with X, at all. How are you starting X? I start it manually from the console via startx, and in order for that to work, I've needed the xserver-xorg-legacy package and some matching settings configured locally. IIRC that around the time of the systemd switchover (not necessarily tied to systemd itself), there were changes made in the way X is to be launched, such that with the right configuration it can be run without root rights - but that if you don't have that configuration, and you're not launching X as root directly, you need this "legacy" setup. Last time I was looking at it, I don't think I found any practical way to do that configuration without systemd or some replication of part of its functionality. For what it's worth, I track current testing, and the only systemd-related packages on my system that I know of are libsystemd0 and udev. I certainly don't have any problems with starting X. I did the initial upgrade around the time of the original init-systems GR, and have been tracking testing in this way ever since; the most I've had to do is wrangle some package pins to avoid having some dependency attempt to install libpam-systemd (and therefore switch the init system to systemd) on package install or dist-upgrade, and that hasn't been particularly hard for quite some time now. -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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