Hello Linux Geeksters. After a lot of debates, the Debian Technical Committee has decided to make Red Hat’s systemd the default init service manager of Debian Jessie, which will be released in 2015. Actually, the Debian developers have already started work, making a backports repository of systemd already available, in order to help the other developers that want to adopt systemd on their Linux systems.
Not long after that, Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Canonical supports Debian’s decision to switch to systemd and that Ubuntu will also replace Upstart with Systemd, starting with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, the next long term supported Ubuntu system.
For Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr and Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin, systemd has been added to a third party PPA, so testing it on the latest Ubuntu LTS systems is easy. All you have to do is add the ppa to your system, update the local repository index and perform a system upgrade. Like this:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pitti/systemd
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Optional: Update the /etc/default/grub file before you edit it, just in case you break something:
$ sudo cp /etc/default/grub /etc/default/grub.bak
Next, open the /etc/default/grub file, with sudo permissions:
$ sudo vim /etc/default/grub
Edit the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line, so that it looks like this:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT = "init=/lib/systemd/systemd"
And upgrade the grub, in order to get the latest changes applied:
$ sudo update-grub
Optional: If you break something (but you have performed the backup step), do:
$ sudo mv /etc/default/grub.bak /etc/default/grub
$ sudo update-grub
Note: Due to the fact that Upstart has some optimizations created for Ubuntu and systemd is in its early stage of the porting process, your system will not boot up faster with systemd (for now).