Dev1 Galaxy Forum / Installation

system crash after upgrade to excalibur

dummy@example.com (Mercury) — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 18:08:50 +0000

Your post does not have much information from which to diagnose.

How long after the desktop loads do you observe the crash?

When the cash occurs are you able to switch to a basic console with Ctrl+Alt+2?

Freia installation issues

dummy@example.com (fsmithred) — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 17:17:29 +0000

Confirmed.

task-lxqt-desktop and sddm are installed, but there are no lxqt packages installed. Boots to console login. And 'startx' seems to be missing, although there are xorg packages installed.

I've installed lxqt in freia a few times previously, but always after a base (no-X) install. This is the first time I've tried selecting lxqt from the tasksel menu, so I don't know if this is a new behavior or not.

apt install lxqt brings in a lot. (Total 1477 packages) It looks like everything is there now.

Devuan without refracta

dummy@example.com (jpthiran) — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 11:52:49 +0000

The answer is:
- devuan_excalibur_6.1.1_amd64_desktop.iso .----- 4 G - installer-iso/ - option 1 install (simple install)
In fact it's the easier way to install, much easier then Refracta

[SOLVED] Chose runit but getting mashup of SysV and Runit

dummy@example.com (mark_2461) — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 18:26:42 +0000

At the moment, so that there's no confusion and the system is usable I just installed it with SysV init. As I mentioned during the install you can see the runit packages getting installed, but managing services using runit init commands doesn't work. you still have to use the sysvinit commands and everything is inside /etc/init.d where you'd expect to find things on a sysvinit system. That's where things are now.

Mark

Test report Freia netinstall 20260819

dummy@example.com (yohno) — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 06:50:06 +0000

I posted my experiences in installing Freia or Devuan 7 from its7.0-202608191935_amd64_netinstall.iso. Since the topic is related with Freia, I decided to post here what I have done this week.
[Background]
I had good impression installing Freia with lxqt several weeks ago, using its June-built netinstall iso on AMD PC with 2 SSDs of Devuan(450GB) and Windows11(125GB) respectively. 2 weeks ago, I started the re-installation of Windows 11 so that I needed to re-install Freia once again. But could not achieve the successful installation. I did not understand why so I repeated the installation this week with my low-end i5 Intel PC(4GBx2 with 320GB SSD), purchased via auction. This test result might be caused by my cooling-capacity-constraint PC, due to the summer environment. If so, apology.
[Result]
A. Xfce4
The result is getting better day-by-day due to daily system upgrade by Devuan team. Thanks for the hard work! Now it should be OK on Freia but it is not full-version installed, instead. For both of Excalibur and Freia net install iso's, I saw some difference of logoff-menu on xfce-panel. only logoff button is valid on Freia but fully valid for 5 switches on Excalibur. Used to be about 930 items installed but now 1117 items installed after selecting WM options of KDE/Cinnamon,Xfce lxde ... Full install could be more like 1160 or 1165 when I installed via 4GB devuan_excalibur_6.1.1_amd64_desktop.iso. tested yesterday.
B. LxQt
No improvement in my test period, I made multiple successes several weeks ago. I thought by selection of SSH sever option could be helpful while testing on xfce4. But it is not but increasing # of items by 5 or so. The item # installed was 926 and increased 938 items if web server option is on. No effect on the result. On the last test, I installed openbox and obconf, tint2 in addition to lightdm after login or just seeing ">". After rebooting, the system is confirmed if either of SDDM or Lightdm to be used on next login.
I saw nothing with error message of no-session for pid1806 on the screen after reboot then I made right-click by mouse to see openbox window. Obviously nothing from lxqt. After installing synaptic, 1 item of task-lxqt-desktop is x-marked and total installed item # was 1201.

Please understand I am not complaning but appreciating your team's hard work. Thanks, Yoshi
PS
I do not use much for Windows 11 on anotter SSD since Virtualbox installed on Devuan! I installed vuudo 5.03 under VB on Windows11, not latest, by the way.

[SOLVED] Freia Unable to Detect Network Hardware

dummy@example.com (RecklessEpoch) — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 02:05:32 +0000

@ribit Issue solved as of devuan_freia_7.0-202609090121_amd64_netinstall.iso Thank you to all.

[SOLVED] No graphical login or desktop, even after installing SLIM and IceWM

dummy@example.com (fredbird67) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:36:25 +0000

Never mind -- after I posted this, I realized I forgot to install xserver-xorg -- DUHHH!!!

Some stupid questions to prepare for Devuan installation

dummy@example.com (Ryccardo) — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 21:39:39 +0000

Can confirm installing Excalibur with ZFS is not particularly difficult if you're familiar with a manual installation (i.e. debootstrap)!

It basically comes to:

Do a full (= non-live, or maybe live+persistence) install to another disk
Boot from it and install headers + zfs-dkms + zfs-utils + debootstrap (might as well get other utilities like arch-install-scripts, gdisk, nvme-cli, and various other filesystems on it)
Create pool and datasets with appropriate options; personally I went for 4 datasets - root, home, media+documents, and /var/cache/apt/archives — this is not particularly distro-specific, refer to ZfsBootMenu's tutorials for Void and Debian,
Unmount, temporary-remount, install base system with debootstrap, chroot in (arch-chroot from the above package or Void's xchroot are convenient for automatically passing /dev /sys and /proc), configure sources.list/hostname/timezone/keyboard/locales (the last 3 points are "best" done in the Debian system with dpkg-reconfigure), install network access software/aptitude/sudo/whatever-you-like and configure users + superuser access — as you can see, although this general point is somewhat laborious, it's not ZFS specific (and is somewhat explained in the above guides)
Install kernel + headers + zfs-dkms + zfs-utils — hey, you pretty much did it before
Download and setup ZfsBootMenu — yup, still explained by ZfsBootMenu people
Check that it works, install desired applications, spend 30 minutes on customizations like sudo insults & saving password for 2 hours and decrapifying Firefox, enjoy — not ZFS specific either

No luck (haven't tried the above manual backport method) with a (2020 GDDR5 reissue) 710, and Nouveau likes freezing, not that I expected better from the green company on my blacklist since the 2007 BGA reliability scandals with about as much support of libre as Br*adcom...!

Both Desktop and Netinstall Installer Fails

dummy@example.com (stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mtn) — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 07:08:03 +0000

@ralph.ronnquist, thanks for taking the time and effort to explain why Ventoy causes/creates issues/problems/failures for _some_but_not_all_ folks!
(imhho, your post deserves a "sticky" somewhere it can be easily found)

[SOLVED] persist initramfs fsck.log / persist the following output on disc fail

dummy@example.com (Deiwah8y) — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:28:36 +0000

I just registered to this forum explicitly to thank you for this.

I'm glad to hear this.

I hope this is being posted back to the maintainers as a bugfix.

I mail this to ralph.ronnquist same day, but no answer yet :-(
I could not find another person related to "initscripts" package.

[SOLVED] Installation Problem after selecting Language and Country

dummy@example.com (Bobby) — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 03:07:55 +0000

Installation was successful! It seems like it was just that mounting issue and the occasional freeze for some reason.

I do seem to have some issues getting and upgrading packages, but I assume that's more of a networking issue I can figure out (I don't have ethernet, so I used my phone's internet during the installing).

Thanks for all the help, everyone!

Kde profiles with TLP

dummy@example.com (patgaw) — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:57:26 +0000

Guys Chat GTP managed to solve it. It was about autostart order. He created script to restart powerdevil after start.

patryk@devuan:~$ cat ~/.config/autostart/powerdevil-restart.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=PowerDevil restart
Exec=sh -c "sleep 5; /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libexec/org_kde_powerdevil"
X-KDE-autostart-after=panel
patryk@devuan:~$

Thank you steve_v

overlay-root

dummy@example.com (Devarch) — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:34:57 +0000

Does bilibop use a lot of RAM?

How many is too many? All hard disk writes are happen in RAM. You can use noatime, nodiratime options for FS. Then all logs, /var. /tmp are in the RAM.
By default tmpfs is limited by 1/2 of RAM and you can change this value. To give you an idea, I'm using it even on very old laptop with 8 Gb RAM and no SWAP! But ... I prefer to keep only one browser with around 30 pages open and not 2 or 3 browser while watching video on this machine.

32 Gb of RAM, no swap, default tmpfs everything works perfectly: couple of browsers, video and ... virtual machine with 8 GB of virtual RAM or small local LLM.

[SOLVED] Upcoming Devuan install with full disk encryption - Tips & Advice?

dummy@example.com (Devarch) — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:24:08 +0000

I am using the traditional "full disk"-encryption with luks, that leaves /boot unencrypted.

Best balance simplicity/security.

No audio in fresh install of Excalibur

dummy@example.com (Catnip) — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 12:28:49 +0000

I recently ran into sound issues on my humble desktop (HP Prodesk 400 G3 mini). I believe some of the software I installed had pulseaudio dependencies and I was conflicting with pipewrire and pulse audio. i am guessing, not a developer and may be incorrect - so corrections are welcomed.

Borrowing from Kappa above here is what fixed it for me, and essentially only going to pulse audio. basiclly purged everythign and reinstalled pulseaudio. On reboot set the mixer, saved - next reboot it worked.

#purged everything
sudo apt-get purge wireplumber pipewire-alsa pipewire-audio pipewire pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils pavucontrol pulseaudio-module-bluetooth pipewire pipewire-bin pipewire-pulse
#re-installed pulseaudio
sudo apt install wireplumber pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils pavucontrol pulseaudio-module-bluetooth pipewire pipewire-bin pipewire-pulse

System
OS: Devuan GNU/Linux 6 (excalibur) x86_64
Host: HP ProDesk 400 G3 DM
Kernel: Linux 6.12.96+deb13-amd64
DE: Xfce4 4.20
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7500T (4) @ 3.30 GHz

system has a horrible internal single speaker; Sound bar plugged into the headphone jack for speakers

aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: CX20632 Analog [CX20632 Analog]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0