Upgrade from Devuan Jessie to ASCII

First edit the sources.list file so that the branch can be changed to ASCII.

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

Add the latest Devuan mirror and the ASCII branch as shown. Comment out any other lines.

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

Upgrade the Devuan keyring to make sure you have the latest version.

root@devuan:~# apt-get upgrade devuan-keyring

Update the package index files.

root@devuan:~# apt-get update

The only thing left to do is upgrade the system.

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

The problem:

• (fsmithred) The kernel doesn't get upgraded automatically unless a kernel metapackage is installed.

Solutions:

• Install the kernel metapackage (recommended)
• Install a newer kernel package directly

• Find available packages via apt-cache search linux-image. Then run apt-get install <package>.
• Note: This does not remove the old kernel package. But it can be safely removed through apt after reboot. You may be asked to run update-grub after removing it.

You're working with the leaner key generation interface that was introduced in version 2.1. Use

gpg --full-gen-key

to get all the options.

You're most likely missing the pinentry-tty package. After installing it, open the file ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf in your favorite text editor and add a line saying:

pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-tty

After saving the file, run:

gpgconf --kill gpg-agent

Now it should work as expected.

• Note: You might also consider using pinentry-curses.

The problem:

Solutions:

• either add needs_root_rights=yes to /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config (tested)
• or install elogind and libpam-elogind to run X as a normal user (verify)

This is due to Bash running the clear_console program on log-out. This behavior can be changed by editing (or simply deleting) the file ~/.bash_logout.

For more information, see http://bugs.devuan.org/209

As superuser, run:

update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme

Then select the desired theme by number and hit Enter. After logging out and in again, the cursor theme should be changed back.

This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International CC BY-SA 4.0 license.