On Sunday 15 July 2018 01:34:01 Nick Koretsky wrote:
On Sat, 14 Jul 2018 19:50:38 -0700
William Morder doctor_contendo@zoho.com wrote:
On the whole, Devuan runs much faster than Debian, and also my system doesn't hang. I started having these and other problems, and returned for the moment to Debian Jessie, which runs okay, but hangs a lot, and when I try to reboot seems to get permanently stuck on some stuff called rpcbind and watchdog. (Also I note that systemd is always doing something, don't know what.)
I am contemplating some kind of FrankenDebian hack (or rather, FrankenDevuan). I seem to recall that somebody mentioned that sysvinit could be installed, and systemd purged, on a Debian system. The do upgrades from the Debian repositories, but keep sysvinit and avoid the systemd problems.
This depend on what level you want to purge systemd. If it is not for ideological reasons and you are ok with having all sysytemd libraries in system, just want sysvinit as pid 1, then you just need to install sysvinit-core and uninstall systemd-sysv.
Thanks, I believe that answers my question. I've already seen Devuan running more or less like this, and it seemed to do okay. I am not "against" systemd for ideological reasons; I only want my system to run smoothly and efficiently, not to hang up, that kind of thing; and something like this would seem to be my solution, at least temporarily.
As for getting off-topic, I will drop it for now, as I have got my own answer, and leave others to work out these other issues that don't concern me.
BTW, a trick to prevent systemd accidentally getting reinstalled as pid 1 on updates - create a file in /etc/apt/preferences.d with following content:
Package: systemd-sysv Pin: release o=Debian Pin-Priority: -1
Thanks to those recent tips from deloptes and Nick Koretsky, my system is now purring like a kitten.
And I did find a file called avoid-systemd in that folder, so I copied it for backup.
Bill