Minimal Installation of Devuan 2

With Devuan being a Debian fork without systemd a lot will be similar to the Minimal Installation of Debian 9

We will do the installation form Devuan's netinstall iso, grab it from https://files.roundr.devuan.org/devuan_ascii/installer-iso/devuan_ascii_2.0.0_amd64_netinst.iso

  1. Boot from the CD, choose “Install”
  2. Select your language, country, locale
  3. Enter a hostname
  4. Enter a root password, a user and user password
  5. Partitioning method: select “Guided – use entire disk” and confirm
  6. The installer will now install the base system
  7. Select mirror country
  8. In Software selection select nothing, de-select all pre-selected items, continue
  9. Install grub to the MBR
  10. Reboot

After your new installation comes up login as root

  • Optional: apt install openssh-server, ssh into your box
  • Edit /etc/network/interfaces
# The primary network interface
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet static
        address 10.0.2.16/24
        gateway 10.0.2.2
        dns-nameservers 1.1.1.1

replace the interface name , address, gateway with your values. Note that Devuan still uses the old network interface names (e.g. eth0 instead of enp0s3)

Now clean up unnecessary stuff

apt remove --purge elogind

Reboot

That's it. As you see Devuan as a non-systemd distro already does a very minimal install per default – we only needed to remove elogind which is only needed by X.

On my system it uses 704 MB hard disk space and uses 46 MB RAM.

Of course, if you now start to install software it is very likely that some of the packages we removed will be pulled in back.

Minimal installation of Xorg with Fluxbox

apt install fluxbox
apt install xinit
apt install xterm

Note: This will pull elogind, which we removed earlier, back into the system

As a user edit ~/.xinitrc exec startfluxbox

Save the file and then type startx.

Save the file and then type startx. The fluxbox window manager will appear, you should be able to right-click and launch xterm by Applications –> Shells –> Bash

Screenshot of the minimal Devuan with Fluxbox

So, if you intend to install a minimal Devuan system with X you only need to do a base install and execute apt install xinit plus your favorite window manager, that's all.

One note about boot time Debian vs Devuan: With both systems installed nearly identical Debian with systemd needs 0.5 seconds more too boot up as Devuan with sysvinit (Debian 7.0 seconds, Devuan 6.5 second). Of course, this half maybe within the fault tolerance of my measurements, but it is safe to say that sysvinit is not slower at boot than systemd.