Hi!
I noticed that there is a RUNIT package in the repositories for OpenMandriva. I have been feeling adventurous about initsystems lately and would love to try the package out. I have just no clue how to go about replacing the systemD package with Runit.
Does just installing the Runit package replace the systemD installation on my system or would I need to do some additional steps after replacing it?
I am willing to help in documentation and steps to get people to swap out systemD with Runit if that is even necessary to do.
Mayby I’m not the best person to answer that because I’m not OM developer, just a regular user, but I have asked similar questions before.
As far as I remember and understood @bero replays to my inquiries in that subject.
Open Mandriva uses systemd but only those parts of the code that are really necessary and useful without a bloat or strange garbage. Yup there was a time when I to wanted to replace sysd on OM. I do not feel it is necessary or useful now.
Keep in mind that OM is created by a really small set of independent devs.
Putting a bunch of stuff in to wel tailored distro can be difficult to maintain and support in a long run For them. I’m my self black box, xfce and runit guy jet I can live on distro using kde and systemd. Why because it is fantastically well-made.
I recently bought nvidia which does not work on OM so I return that green goblin trash and switched back to radeon, just because it works with the distro I wanna use
I’m also not a developer at all, but if you’re really interested in trying it out, spin up an OM ROME VM and test things out there. If it works…great! You can tell us all about it. If it doesn’t, you’ve only messed up a virtual machine, so you can delete it and then try again. I’m currently doing that with an install script that I’m hoping to get ironed out soon.
Replacing an init system is not very simple today. runit is pretty simple (you can install VoidLinux in a VM to see just how incredibly simple the service files truly are), but systemd is very complex. Most desktop environments require some level of integration with systemd now. That’s why Gentoo, Void, Atrix et. al. have to use elogind and several other shims to fill in the missing systemd gaps.
If you’re not talking about a graphical environment, you should be able to create a /etc/sv directory, create the basic boot level services (like the terminal/getty and ssh) and experiment to see if it will boot. The init= kernel command line parameter specifics the init process. You can literally set it to /bin/bash and a single shell will be your init process (your / partition will still be mounted ro at this point)