openRC on debian

linux
Author

Emmanuel Jeandel

Published

October 28, 2024

This post shares my experience in replacing systemd by openrc on my debian.

Installation

To make the installation as easy as possible, I booted from a rescue CD, chrooted into my system, and typed

aptitude install openrc

that’s it ! I tried before on virtual machines to update inside a running machine, it proved to be a mistake

The end result

Even without systemd, you will still see some systemd files and applications:

  • the udev binary is actually called systemd-udevd, because udev is now part of systemd. I have nothing against udev, and replacing it seems a bit cumbersome, so I’ll keep it for now

  • the libsystemd0 package is still installed. A few years ago it was possible to replace it with libelogind0 (ABI compatible) but the new elogind depends on libsystemd0 and conflicts with libelogind0.

An important thing to note is that getting rid of systemd does not get rid of code written in conjunction with systemd. Typically, udev is part of systemd, elogind is a fork of part of systemd…

In my case, I mostly wanted to get rid of journald, hostnamed, resolved, and socket activations.

A few commands

To know the list of services that are currently run:

rc-status

Start/Stop a service

/etc/init.d/NAME [start|stop]
rc-service NAME [start|stop]

Remove a service from startup

rc-update del NAME

Pipewire

Compare to systemd (and runit), openRC does not come with user services, only root services. There are a few programs that are user services, and one of the most important one is pipewire.

To launch pipewire, 3 applications should be run: pipewire, pipewire-pulse and wireplumber

If you use a desktop environment (like KDE or gnome), an easy way to have these programs launched at startup is to create a few XDG files:

root% cat /etc/xdg/autostart/pipewire.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=PipeWire
Comment=Start PipeWire
Icon=pipewire
Exec=pipewire
Terminal=false
Type=Application
NoDisplay=true
root% cat /etc/xdg/autostart/pipewire-pulse.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=PipeWire pulse
Comment=Start PipeWire pulse
Icon=pipewire
Exec=pipewire-pulse
Terminal=false
Type=Application
NoDisplay=true
root% cat /etc/xdg/autostart/wireplumber.desktop 
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Wireplumber
Comment=Start Wireplumber
Icon=pipewire
Exec=wireplumber
Terminal=false
Type=Application
NoDisplay=true