On 2020-03-22 21:57 -0400, The Wanderer wrote:
> On 2020-03-22 at 21:21, Marc Shapiro wrote:
>
>> Supposedly, one can install/upgrade to Buster while maintaining sysv
>> as init. Or has this changed. Over the past several months I have
>> been attempting to upgrade to Buster, but I have been completely
>> unsuccessful.
>>
>> Has anyone managed to upgrade to Buster without installing systemd,
>> or jumping through hoops that would drive a lion tamer mad?
>>
>> I made a copy of all of my partitions so that I could do the upgrade
>> while maintaining Stretch in case something went wrong. I'm glad
>> that I did!
>>
>> The first time that I tried this, I actually managed to upgrade to
>> Buster and have everything appear to work. Then I realized that I
>> had only done an "upgrade" but not a "full-upgrade". After that, X
>> would not start. I have, as I said, spent several months trying to
>> get X working on Buster without systemd. I have not been successful.
>> None of my later attempts ever got a working Buster with X, at all.
>
> How are you starting X?
>
> I start it manually from the console via startx, and in order for that
> to work, I've needed the xserver-xorg-legacy package and some matching
> settings configured locally.
>
> IIRC that around the time of the systemd switchover (not necessarily
> tied to systemd itself), there were changes made in the way X is to be
> launched, such that with the right configuration it can be run without
> root rights - but that if you don't have that configuration, and you're
> not launching X as root directly, you need this "legacy" setup. Last
> time I was looking at it, I don't think I found any practical way to do
> that configuration without systemd or some replication of part of its
> functionality.
It should be possible to run X without root rights if you install
elogind. What the X server needs is access to your input devices, and
logind provides that to locally logged in users.
With systemd-logind startx works out of the box, no configuration
necessary. Since elogind is a fork of systemd-logind, I suspect the
same holds for it, but I cannot easily test that.
Cheers,
Sven
