On the last UDS we talked about migrating from upstart to systemd to boot Ubuntu, after Mark announced that Ubuntu will follow Debian in that regard. There’s a lot of work to do, but it parallelizes well once developers can run systemd on their workstations or in VMs easily and the system boots up enough to still be able to work with it.

So today I merged our systemd package with Debian again, dropped the systemd-services split (which wasn’t accepted by Debian and will be unnecessary now), and put it into my systemd PPA. Quite surprisingly, this booted a fresh 14.04 VM pretty much right away (of course there’s no Plymouth prettiness). The main two things which were missing were NetworkManager and lightdm, as these don’t have an init.d script at all (NM) or it isn’t enabled (lightdm). Thus the PPA also contains updated packages for these two which provide a proper systemd unit. With that, the desktop is pretty much fully working, except for some details like cron not running. I didn’t go through /etc/init/*.conf with a small comb yet to check which upstart jobs need to be ported, that’s now part of the TODO list.

So, if you want to help with that, or just test and tell us what’s wrong, take the plunge. In a 14.04 VM (or real machine if you feel adventurous), do

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pitti/systemd sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

This will replace systemd-services with systemd , update network-manager and lightdm , and a few libraries. Up to now, when you reboot you’ll still get good old upstart. To actually boot with systemd, press Shift during boot to get the grub menu, edit the Ubuntu stanza, and append this to the linux line: init=/lib/systemd/systemd .

For the record, if pressing shift doesn’t work for you (too fast, VM, or similar), enable the grub menu with

sudo sed -i '/GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT/ s/^/#/' /etc/default/grub sudo update-grub

Once you are satisfied that your system boots well enough, you can make this permanent by adding the init= option to /etc/default/grub (and possibly remove the comment sign from the GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT lines) and run sudo update-grub again. To go back to upstart, just edit the file again, remove the init=</code option, and run <code>sudo update-grub again.

I’ll be on the Debian systemd/GNOME sprint next weekend, so I feel reasonably well prepared now. 🙂

Update: As the comments pointed out, this bricked /etc/resolv.conf . I now uploaded a resolvconf package to the PPA which provides the missing unit (counterpart to the /etc/init/resolvconf.conf upstart job) and this now works fine. If you are in that situation, please boot with upstart, and do the following to clean up:

sudo rm /etc/resolv.conf sudo ln -s ../run/resolvconf/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf

Then you can boot back to systemd.