1.1. Introduction#
Welcome to the website of genuen, a ready-to-use operating system that aims to be entirely free as in freedom. This means that we reject all the nonfree stuff, whether software, manuals or documentation. Free software is about having control over the technology we use, empowering people against proprietary software and digital restrictions. When it comes to Free software, the term free relates to freedom as in free speech, and not to cost.
Genuen is a libre spin of Devuan GNU/Linux (a fork of Debian without systemd), allowing users to get control over their computer and ensuring Init Freedom.
1.2. Features#
Init. OpenRC, runit and s6 are the init systems you can choose from. 66, a service manager built on s6, is available as well and is still in development.
Device manager. vdev is the default device manager. eudev can be installed as an alternative.
Web browsers. The browsers are Abrowser and GNU Icecat. Abrowser is the free browser of the Trisquel GNU/Linux project. GNU Icecat is the web browser of the GNU Project.
Ubus. Ubus is the inter-process bus, taken from OpenWrt, that services on the system use to talk to each other.
debian-installer. debian-installer, the installer from Debian, is how the system is installed. Images are available both as live images and as installer ISOs.
Linux-libre. The kernel is Linux-libre, the free publication of the Linux kernel maintained by the GNU Linux-libre project.
simple-netaid. simple-netaid is the network manager. It brings network interfaces up and down, joins wireless networks, and publishes that service on Ubus. Interface configuration goes through ifupdown2.
ifupdown2. ifupdown2 is the successor of the obsolete ifupdown, and it is what simple-netaid uses. It keeps the same /etc/network/interfaces file, brings interfaces up in parallel, checks the configuration before applying it, and reloads changes with ifreload while leaving unchanged interfaces up.
1.3. Repositories#
The mechanism for merging devuan and genuen mirrors is amprolla, an apt repository merger originally intended for use with the Devuan infrastructure, where merged packages get translated by some magic to a local mirror or redirected to a external one, as the case may be.
As in the devuan scenario, genuen package repositories are exclusive as well, that is to say they shouldn’t be mixed with other apt-based repositories, including Devuan, Debian, Ubuntu and the like.
Genuen is a fully amprolla setup, and it follows that package repositories shouldn’t be mixed with other apt-based repositories.
It is also important to point out that genuen uses the same codenames than devuan and it’s highly recommended to use them in the /etc/apt/sources.list entries other than suite (oldstable, stable, testing…).
For instance, to point the repositories to the stable release based on Devuan 6 Excalibur, the sources.list file should look as follows:
deb http://packages.genuen.org/merged excalibur main
deb-src http://packages.genuen.org/merged excalibur main
deb http://packages.genuen.org/merged excalibur-updates main
deb-src http://packages.genuen.org/merged excalibur-updates main
deb http://packages.genuen.org/merged excalibur-security main
deb-src http://packages.genuen.org/merged excalibur-security main`1.4. Congratulations#
To end with, we would like to thank the whole Devuan community that has made this project possible… Thank you, and happy hacking!