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posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the more-devuan-than-devuan dept.

DistroWatch reports

Geeks determined to resist the systemd juggernaut have several options. For me, the most interesting project is Devuan, a fork of Debian. [...] However, it does have a few flaws

[...] It was my search for a quick and easy way to get Devuan up and running that led me to Refracta, a unique distro that fills a niche that has long been neglected. Refracta's existence predates the systemd wars--it was originally based on Debian 5.0, otherwise known as "Lenny". But when Debian 8.0 "Jessie" went full systemd, Refracta moved to the Devuan camp.

Refracta's chief selling point is this: it's a live image that can be quickly installed, customized, and re-installed again. So basically you can roll your own live CD, configured for your hardware and tweaked to suit your personal tastes. It is currently my favorite distro, and I'd recommend it to any Linux geek who has had a little bit of experience. A total Linux newbie might feel more comfortable with a distro that mimics Windows' point-and-click friendliness, but once you've got the basics down, Refracta is easy to get used to.

It's also worth mentioning that even without being installed, a Refracta live CD or USB stick makes an excellent diagnostic and rescue tool. It contains quite a few command line utilities that aren't in a default Devuan or Debian installation, including gddrescue, testdisk, smartmontools, hdparm, lm-sensors, iftop, and iptraf.

[...] Unlike Devuan which uses PulseAudio, Refracta employs ALSA.

[...] Starting with version 8.0, Refracta has gone whole-hog at banishing systemd, not to mention PulseAudio. [...] One could say that Refracta is actually more Devuan than Devuan.


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:24PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:24PM (#419018)

    All that matters is my hardware is supported and the list of hardware is accurate so I buy the right stuff. With the rush to virtualization I'm way more interested in support of VirtIO_pci0 than some random ether card anyway.

    By LUKS you probably mean dm-crypt support to encrypt partitions. The project name you don't know to google for that already included in freebsd is "GELI" that supposedly does a pretty good or equivalent job. I have no personal experience with partition encryption under linux or freebsd, somehow its just never come up. AFAIK GELI has a good reputation. From a known-plaintext standpoint, whole disk encryption makes me nervous. I mean if someone had a known plaintext attack wouldn't whole disk encryption be exactly what they'd recommend their victims do? Also, who exactly am I protecting myself from by hiding /bin/ls ? If the system gets powned or I lose physical security shouldn't I assume they completely pwn the device anyway regardless of encryption on the disk?

    I don't really see myself pining for the old days of ext2 or ReiserFS if I have access to ZFS that being one of the killer features. Both freebsd and linux have FUSE support of course. And encfs and iso9660 for legacy media etc etc. I concede if you do legacy recovery or forensics you might need minix FS or something truly weird and linux only. Of course special projects can use special tools without changing the standard loadout.

    In summary I'd agree that theoretically there could be valid reasons, none of which I've run into in practice.

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