Upgrade Devuan Chimaera to Daedalus

If you don’t already know, Devuan GNU+Linux is a fork of Debian without systemd that allows users to reclaim control over their system by avoiding unnecessary entanglements and ensuring Init Freedom.

While latest Devuan Daedalus (version 5) is getting close to the release date but it’s still beta, some people might be impacient and want to already upgrade Chimaera (version 4) to Daedalus. It’s a really simple upgrade but your mileage may vary depending on what packages you need.

Start by replacing all occurencies of chimaera with daedalus inside /etc/apt/sources.list. You should have those three lines, everything else should be commented out for now:

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

Next to a manual update of the package lists:

$ sudo apt update

Upgrade the installed packages to the latest versions and keep in mind that this does not complete the Chimaera->Daedalus migration.

$ sudo apt upgrade

Now perform the migration:

$ sudo apt dist-upgrade

Finish by cleaning up the orphaned packages and any left-overs from the previous Devuan installation.

$ sudo apt autoremove --purge
$ sudo apt autoclean

Done. Everything in Daedalus works great for me, so far.