Introduction
systemd is a system and service manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts. systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups, supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic. It can work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit.
Installation
Tollef packaged a very first systemd package as (0~git+20100605+dfd8ee-1) and pushed it to experimental. Currently its v11 in the official repositories and v12 is on its road. systemd uses dbus from upstream, means you need dbus >=1.4.0, which can also be found in experimental. You have to enhance your sources.list and add experimental Distribution.
To install systemd (and dbus) from experimental:
apt-get update apt-get install -t experimental dbus systemd
Known Issues and Bugs
Use native mount
You can use native (means systemd's) mount by activating it in /etc/systemd/system.conf (by default both lines are commented).
egrep 'MountAuto|SwapAuto' /etc/systemd/system.conf MountAuto=yes SwapAuto=yes
Who is who?
Maintainer of the systemd package is Tollef Fog Heen (Mithrandir). Currently, it's discussed to get Michael Biebl (mbiebl) as co-maintainer.
Where to get help?
As systemd is a very young project (see [1]), we would appreciate to use the exisiting upstream infrastructure like mailing-list [2], IRC and read Lennart's blog [3], etc. Most people interested in systemd development and Debian-specific packaging are around on IRC: #systemd (irc.freenode.net).
[1] http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html
[2] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel