Installing sysvinit on Buster alongside Xfce, network-manager, etc?

[Mark Hindley]

On Fri, May 03, 2019 at 10:38:26AM +0100, Jacob Nevins wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Thank you for your work in this group.
> 
> I'm a returning Debian user, and I'm trying for a Buster install on a
> laptop running sysvinit and the Xfce desktop environment, including
> conveniences like network-manager.
> 
> I haven't had much luck so far, even after trying to pick the latest
> elogind (241.1-1+debian1) from unstable.
> 
> This is a fresh amd64 Buster install (from the debian-installer RC1
> netinst image), including tasks "Xfce" and "laptop". So it started out
> running systemd.
> 
> I tried just installing sysvinit-core and elogind from testing, but that
> causes apt to try to uninstall a lot of things including network-manager
> and task-xfce-desktop, which I don't want.
> 
> As I understand it (not very well), elogind 241.1 and related packages
> are intended to address this sort of conflict by providing a libsystemd0
> that is binary-compatible with the one from the systemd package.
> Unfortunately, that version is not currently scheduled to get into
> Buster: <https://bugs.debian.org/925489>.
> 
> So I set up some apt pinning so that I could try to install elogind from
> unstable. I think I achieved what I intended with the apt pinning, but
> on attempting to install the newer elogind (details below), apt still
> tries to remove half the world.
> 
> I'm not that familiar with apt's reasoning, so I haven't figured out the
> chain of dependencies/conflicts leading to its decision. I also don't
> really understand what all the moving parts would be in a working
> sysvinit + desktop-environment setup and how they interrelate. It's also
> possible I just have my apt recipe wrong.
> 
> Am I along the right lines? -- will it be possible to have sysvinit and
> things like network-manager coexist in a Buster installation by
> cherry-picking elogind (and possibly keeping it up to date as
> real-systemd gets security updates)?
> 
> Multiarch is also in play: I have installed wine32 which pulls in a load
> of :i386 packages, including systemd-related ones. I don't know if that
> complicates things; I could certainly live without wine32 if so.

Yes, it does. You will need libelogind0:i386 too.

We missed the freeze for Buster, so the dependencies will not work with a mixed
Buster/Sid install.

You *might* get it to work with libpam-elogind-compat from experimental. It
should sort out the dependencies, but I haven't tried it recently.

You may be better with a pure sid installation which works for me.

Good luck!

Mark