You have to exclude a few things and then you can add them later.
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=47276#p47276

Old but still useful -
https://refracta.org/docs/debian-handbook-wheezy.pdf
Last Debian Administrator's Handbook before systemd.

It still says you're missing non-free firmware. Do you know which firmware package you need? If you're going to use a devuan kernel, you can install the non-free stuff. If you use the libre kernel, you can't use the non-free stuff.

If the system doesn't work without the non-free stuff then you can't use the libre kernel.
If the system does work without the non-free stuff, you can ignore the warnings.

In general, you should not try to mix testing/unstable packages with the stable release. That can lead to a lot of mismatched programs and libraries, and that will get worse as the testing progresses.

Instead, you should backport the package to build it for your stable system.
https://wiki.debian.org/SimpleBackportCreation

For some packages that's easy, and for some it's not.

I got it from here: https://github.com/pixelb/ps_mem
You don't need to "install" anything. Just grab the script itself and make it executable. I changed "python" to "python3" in the shebang and run it with 'python3 ps_mem.py".

Those memory figures aren't written in stone. I checked an excalibur lxqt on a laptop here, and it only uses 305 MiB, That's the result of a more selective install without the task-* packages.

The top of the output is cut off in all the screenshots. Here are the column headings:

Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used	Program

systemd has /etc/machine-id in addition to /var/lib/dbus/machine-id. We have the latter and if you don't want it to change on every boot, edit /etc/default/dbus.

I'm not sure, but I think PeppermintOS uses Calamares. Talk to Grafiksinc, one of their devs who also happens to post here occasionally. You probably need to go over there to get his attention. There might be a way to remove the systemd dependency.

Stultumanto beat me to it. Someone in IRC mentioned the same problem, so I just did a uefi install in qemu, and sure enough, I screwed up the first time and didn't boot uefi. When I did it right, the install worked and it installed grub. I still had to go through the uefi shell in qemu to get to the boot file, but it did boot. On a real hardware boot, there's probably a key to press that will show you a boot device menu, listing all the hard drives and usb or cdroms that are present. There might be two entries for the usb - one for legacy and one for uefi.

As mentioned, check to see that /sys/firmware/efi exists when you boot the live. There are other ways, to tell.

Note the color of the grub boot menu background. If it's blue, you booted in legacy bios mode. And it's a syslinux/isolinux boot menu, which looks different from a grub boot menu. When you boot the desktop-live in uefi mode, you get a black background at the boot menu.

More on desktops:

lxqt pulls in pulseaudio (like lxde does)
cinnamon (I had forgotten about this one) pulls in pipewire.
That leaves gnome to be checked. Someone else can do that, please.

Steve,

Thanks for the report. It took me a little while to find "switch user". It's only in the action button on the right side of the panel. It doesn't appear in the Logout window you get from the Applications menu. I can confirm that switch user doesn't work in the default setup.  Also, the who command returns nothing.

I believe you found another bug in the Slim display manager. If you install lightdm, then "Switch user" becomes an additional choice in the logout screen, and it does work. Also, 'who' works then. This problem wasn't in the betas because slim was creating a black window over the desktop with autologin, so I used lightdm in the builds instead.

I was able to reproduce the grub failure in virtualbox, but in qemu it worked normally. I'll stop here on that point - I'm suppressing a rant about grub.

Point taken about the "copy files" button. If you do a uefi install, the button says "Install bootloader". That's an easy fix.

Edit: Forgot to mention ssh. The desktop-live is based on a default task-xfce-desktop install which does not include openssh-server.

List of rust packages in devuan: https://termbin.com/xakg

I can't post the whole list here.

413 Request Entity Too Large

TLDR:
70430 packages, including virtual packages
3561 packages, excluding virtual packages

I'm not seeing that behavior on fresh install of excalibur or upgrade from daedalus to excalibur. syslog and kern.log are there. /var/log/messages has been missing for years. Make sure rsyslog and cron are installed and running.

I did an upgrade from daedalus to excalibur yesterday and the date on /etc/rsyslog.conf is February of 2023. Nobody has edited it.

I got this on a kde install of excalibur I did yesterday.

root      1421  0.6  4.0 880628 88088 ?        Ssl  17:43   0:01 /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg -nolisten tcp -background none -seat seat0 vt2 -auth /run/sddm/xauth_yIsirg -noreset -displayfd 16

I have /etc/sddm/wayland-session and /etc/sddm/Xsession and neither one looks like a config file to me.