Devuan, the Debian spin-off that will not include systemd has posted its first progress report.

The missive says things are going well, as the project now has a GitLab repository and has built the first devuan-baseconf package.

The team behind Devuan has also started “following and supporting any cutting-edge research on strategies and expedients to support Init Freedom” and has found at least one contributor that's tossed in some code.

The result of those and other efforts is Loginkitd , billed as “a compatible, yet standalone alternative to logind and libsystemd which does not depend on a specific init system. Loginkitd aims to act as a glue layer that exposes logind's interface, but uses ConsoleKit2 as a backend.”

The report also says Devuan has 343 people on its mailing list and €3,473 in the bank, plus about 2.2 Bitcoin. There's even a candidate logo.

"Through the year 2015 we intend to use donations to advance towards a Devuan 1.0 release that can seamlessly substitute Debian Jessie while keeping its users safe from the systemd avalanche,” the report says.

All of which sounds pretty optimistic, although a companion financial report (PDF) makes the effort look a little rickety: there's a footnoote explaining just why it was necessary to buy one of the project's members a €541 laptop! ®