I had a very smooth upgrade of a Debian wheezy system to Devuan jessie. This is a small system that doesn’t have a desktop or use any other dbus things — it mostly runs as an unattended server and I only connect to it occasionally.

I just edited sources.list to point to the Devuan repos, then 

apt-get update
apt-get install devuan-keyring
apt-get update
apt-get install apt dpkg
apt-get upgrade -d
apt-get upgrade


** see below for better instructions

and it went very smoothly.

Well to tell the truth, I did do a backup first, and also made sure I had both Debian and Devuan netinstall CD (or DVD) that worked. But as it turned out I didn’t need them. It was very painless and so far the upgrade works just fine.

Next step will be to apt-get dist-upgrade.

Better instructions

In case you are smarter than me, here are some better instructions on how to do the upgrade. I was lucky, my system was simple and could upgrade easily. If you have a desktop or use dbus, you will have problems unless you use dev1fanboys instructions.