Vuu-do: A Veteran Unix User's Minimalist Devuan Build
Vuu-do: A Veteran Unix User's Minimalist Devuan Build
Contents
If you've ever felt that modern desktop Linux has got a bit too heavy for its own good, Vuu-do is the sort of project that restores your faith in doing more with less. It's small, it's sprightly, and it's built by someone who genuinely uses the thing every day rather than a committee designing it on a whiteboard. Let's take a proper look at what makes it tick.
What Exactly Is Vuu-do?
Vuu-do is a lightweight GNU/Linux project built on Devuan, the well-known fork of Debian that ditched systemd in favour of traditional init systems. The name itself is a cheeky little acronym: VUU-DO stands for "Veteran Unix User-do", a nod to the project's creator, who goes by the handle Green Jeans. As the project's own documentation is refreshingly honest about, Green Jeans isn't a professional developer by trade, just a long-standing Unix user who began building personal operating systems for his own use around sixteen years ago, and was eventually persuaded to share them with the wider world.
That origin story matters, because it shapes everything about how Vuu-do behaves. The project's wiki states that Vuu-do "is not a distro per se". It describes itself instead as a user re-spin, a personal project rather than a polished commercial-style release, and it wears that hackiness with pride. The philosophy is refreshingly simple: the smaller the operating system, the faster it runs, so anything not being actively used gets stripped out without sentimentality.
Vuu-do was originally re-spun from MiyoLinux, and it openly borrows that project's guiding spirit, summed up neatly as "Make It Your Own". Every image ships with the tools needed to remaster it, so users aren't just consumers of a finished product, they're invited to tinker, rebuild and redistribute their own variants. There's also a tip of the hat in the documentation to Crunchbang, the much-loved lightweight distribution that first got the creator into Openbox, and to the Refracta and fsmithred toolset that underpins much of the building process.
Because it's based on Devuan, every single version of Vuu-do uses sysvinit rather than systemd, a detail that will delight the "init-freedom" crowd who prefer traditional, transparent service management. The project is released under the GNU General Public License version 3.0, keeping it firmly within the free and open-source software tradition, and it has picked up SourceForge's Community Choice badge, a recognition given to projects that pass ten thousand cumulative downloads.
Vuu-do is also listed on DistroWatch, where it's catalogued as a minimalist desktop Linux distribution built primarily around the Openbox window manager, with an active status and an origin in the USA. It's a fixed-release project rather than a rolling one, and its target audience leans towards people who want a fast, no-nonsense system that runs comfortably even on aging hardware.
Under the Bonnet: Versions, Features and Custom Apps
Vuu-do's version history follows the Devuan family tree closely. Vuu-do 1 is the archived stable branch built on Devuan 1, codenamed Jessie, while the current Vuu-do 5 line is built on Devuan 5, codenamed Daedalus. Alongside these, the project also produces a handful of plain Devuan MATE live DVD images, essentially vanilla Devuan 5 and Devuan 6 with the MATE desktop environment installed, with some builds featuring the Xlibre X11 display server rather than the traditional Xorg stack.
Each generation is offered in two flavours, described by the project simply as "mini" and "max". The mini editions are stripped right back to infrastructure and utilities only, with no web browser or major applications included, making them ideal as a lean base for a custom build. The maximal editions, by contrast, come generously stocked: a browser (either Firefox or Chromium depending on the release), VLC and Exaile for media playback, Inkscape for image editing, HandBrake for video conversion, Transmission for torrents, Asunder for audio ripping, disc-burning tools such as XFburn or Brasero, Hexchat for IRC, WinFF for format conversion, a couple of programs for spreadsheets and documents, a few games, and a stack of extra firmware and utilities for good measure. Printer and scanner support is baked in too, courtesy of CUPS and the Xsane scanning frontend, with the newer releases adding system-config-printer and a wide range of bundled drivers.
Size is where Vuu-do really shows off its minimalist credentials. The original Vuu-do 1 mini weighs in at around 425 megabytes, with its max sibling at roughly 678 megabytes. The newer Vuu-do 5 series has grown a little, as software generally does, with the mini around 877 megabytes and the max around 1.2 gigabytes. Interestingly, the project also offers zstd-compressed variants of its images, which end up roughly ten per cent larger than their xz-compressed counterparts, but reward that extra size with noticeably faster decompression and a snappier response during live sessions and installs.
Openbox versions lean on obmenu-generator to keep the application menu dynamic and current, and the file manager has been enhanced with handy custom right-click options, including "open as root", "open in terminal" and "edit as root", plus the ability to resize or rotate images and set them as wallpaper directly from the file browser. Custom keyboard shortcuts have been added for convenience too, and rather than expect users to memorise them, they're helpfully listed on the Conky system-monitor display for quick reference.
One deliberate and slightly unusual design choice is that Vuu-do strips out documentation files, built-in help, info pages and tutorials entirely, purely to keep the ISO small and fast. If you need those resources for a specific programme, the fix is simple: reopen Synaptic, reinstall the package, and the help functionality returns. Traditional man pages remain onboard throughout, which the creator notes is their own preferred reference method anyway.
Every Vuu-do image doubles as its own remastering toolkit, built with and shipping both Refracta Snapshot and the Refracta Installer, so users can create their own live CD respin or a straightforward installable backup whenever they fancy. Refracta2usb handles live USB creation on the Vuu-do 1 line, while Vuu-do 5 uses Mintstick for the same job. All images are hybrid ISOs, meaning they'll happily boot from CD, DVD or USB, letting you try before you commit to installing.
Beyond the core system, the project has grown a small suite of purpose-built companion applications, with source code hosted on the developer's own Devuan GitLab space. These include VuuNotes, a lightweight note-taking tool, VuuMan, a graphical browser for viewing man pages, and VuuPaper, a dedicated wallpaper manager. It's a nice example of a small project quietly building its own toolkit around a specific way of working, rather than just repackaging someone else's desktop.
Hardware-wise, Vuu-do is genuinely built with older machines in mind. According to the project's own wiki, every release has historically been built and tested on a 2012-model Compaq CQ-58 fitted with a dual-core AMD APU running at a modest 800 megahertz and just 4 gigabytes of RAM. It runs perfectly well on modern, more powerful machines too, but that low-spec baseline is a genuine point of pride. The newer 5.03 releases pack in a substantial amount of legacy firmware to keep older hardware well supported out of the box, though the documentation is upfront that Nvidia graphics users may need to install additional packages, whereas AMD and Intel graphics tend to be well catered for straight away. It's also worth noting plainly that current Vuu-do images are not UEFI-enabled, with EFI-compatible versions still in development at the time of writing.
Getting Started: Downloads, Community and a Few House Rules
Getting hold of Vuu-do is refreshingly straightforward: everything is hosted on SourceForge, organised into folders covering the Vuu-do 5.03 releases, the Vuu-do 5.03 MATE builds, Openbox-specific images, plain Devuan images, a testing area for in-progress work, and a miscellaneous folder for odds and ends. As of the most recent update, the flagship download is a Vuu-do 5.03 Openbox maximal zstd build, released as a hybrid ISO of a little over a gigabyte in size. The project has been ticking along at a healthy pace too, with fresh updates to the custom VuuNotes app, the Openbox mini and max builds, and a new Devuan 6 MATE-mini image featuring Xlibre all landing within recent months.
For anyone wanting to poke around under the surface before committing, the project maintains a proper wiki covering everything from basic setup and keyboard shortcuts to sound configuration, Bluetooth, printing and scanning, SSH, repositories, and the differences between multi-user and single-user setups. It's a genuinely useful resource for a project of this size, and it reflects the same hands-on, share-what-you-know ethos as the rest of the project.
A quick and important practical note for anyone planning to try it: every Vuu-do ISO ships with the same default credentials for testing purposes, username "vuudo" with password "vuudo", and a root password of "root". These are clearly documented defaults meant purely for evaluating the live environment, and as with any distribution shipping default credentials, they should always be changed immediately after a proper installation.
If you'd like to get involved with the community or simply have a question, Green Jeans can typically be found for a few hours most days on Libera.chat's IRC network, hanging around the #devuan and #devuan-offtopic channels, as well as on the independent Devuan users forum. It's a small, friendly, and distinctly old-school way of doing support, in keeping with the project's whole character. At present, Vuu-do has been localised for English and UTF-8 only, though the wiki notes that a sufficiently determined user could rebuild it for another language or locale, and is warmly invited to do so.
A brief concluding word
Vuu-do won't be for everyone, and it doesn't try to be. It's a deeply personal project built by one veteran Unix enthusiast who wanted a fast, uncluttered system for his own machines and generously chose to share it. What you get in return is a genuinely lightweight Devuan-based option with sysvinit throughout, sensible mini and max editions to suit different needs, a thoughtful set of custom conveniences, and an honest, hackable "make it your own" attitude running right through the project. For anyone who enjoys older hardware, minimalist computing, or simply exploring the more characterful corners of the Devuan ecosystem, it's well worth a look.
Disclaimer: All product names, logos, and trademarks mentioned in this article, including Vuu-do, Devuan, Debian, MiyoLinux, Openbox, MATE, Refracta and any other software referenced, remain the property of their respective owners and are used here purely for identification and informational purposes. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information presented, drawing solely on official project sources available at the time of writing, though details such as version numbers and download links may change over time. Readers are encouraged to consult the official sources directly before downloading, installing or deploying any software, and to always use open-source software responsibly and in accordance with its applicable licence terms.
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