With Fedora 24, Debian, and Parabola already on the list, we felt Devuan was an important addition to have, due to the "hassle-free" ethic inherent throughout this campaign. Devuan GNU/Linux Jessie 1.0 Beta for ARM has therefore been tested and is demonstrated with XFCE4:
Setting up Devuan was very straightforward, thanks to the Devuan team providing an armhf set of disk images with minimalist (base) packages pre-installed. The Devuan Beta cubieboard image was downloaded, unzipped, then just as with the Fedora 24 setup the main root filesystem was mounted using losetup -P
and the files could be copied over to a preexisting microSD card on which a previous OS had been installed. From there, it was possible to edit the shadow password file to allow root logins at the console, and installation of XFCE4 proceeded smoothly with apt-get install task-xfce-desktop
.
No customisation was required to get this set up, and the default set of packages looks good: Iceweasel, LibreOffice, Gimp, and more. Even wicd (a much-preferred and vastly simpler Wi-Fi and Ethernet management tool) seems to have been installed by default from task-xfce-desktop. Startup times are reasonable: interestingly the desktop login times on Devuan Jessie (time from login to when the desktop is ready to use) appear to be faster than for Debian, Parabola, and Fedora 24. All in all, it’s looking really good.
We do need names for a Computer Card using Devuan. If anyone has suggestions please contact us through the usual channels: "Ask Question" or on the arm-netbook mailing list