I don't know if this gets rid of the icon, but this will disable searching in the address bar. Or at least it will make it so that your mouse doesn't automatically bounce up to the address bar when you start typing. I haven't actually tried to see if searching in the address bar still works. And I don't have the ddg icon.

In case the search bar gets disabled by an update, here's how to get it back.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1356391

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button accepting the risk.

More info on about:config: Configuration Editor for Firefox. The moderators would like us to remind you that changes made through this back door aren't fully supported and aren't guaranteed to continue working in the future. Since I use this one myself, I feel comfortable mentioning it, even if it does turn out to be temporary relief only.

(2) In the search box in the page, type or paste handoff and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.improvesearch.handoffToAwesomebar preference to switch the value from true to false

Edit: I tried it. "about:blank" gives me a blank page. In the address bar, it says something like "Search with ddg or enter a url" but there's no icon and the page is blank. It is still possible to search in the address bar but it doesn't jump there from the search bar.

Edit2: Sorry, I forgot I was in Chimaera when I did the test. In excalibur there's a duck icon in the address bar. I assume that can be changed by changing the default search engine, in case you like the bing or wikipedia icon better. Do what I do and don't look at the duck.

Oh, maybe I wasn't clear. 1065-refracta-lang is working correctly while the standard live-config option for locales is not working. I just changed the boot menu to use lang= and it works. I haven't tried the latest 1065 yet. And "works" means it shows the language selected at boot plus C plus American English. The keyboard selector has a full range of choices.

One odd thing. In the VM I'm using to make the snapshots, the lightdm puts the widgets on the left side of the top bar, but in the live isos, they're on the right.

- Updated 1065-refracta-lang - and I see that the standard live-config options for locales no longer works. Only the keyboard layout changes. I'll have to hack the boot menu on the next build.

- Fixed lightdm as indicated. Note: lightdm-gtk-greeter allows you to select the locale, slick-greeter allows you to select the keyboard. I don't know how to get either one to do both. (I like the look of slick-greeter)

- Added lines to /etc/pmount.allow (and hacked refractasnapshot and installer to deal with the nvme line)

#/dev/sd[a-z][0-9]*
#/dev/nvme[0-9]n[0-9]p[1-99]

- Diverted xfce background image

inkscape -l deepsea_173556_640x480.png -o deepsea.svg

dpkg-divert --rename --divert /usr/share/backgrounds/xfce/xfce-x.svg.distrib /usr/share/backgrounds/xfce/xfce-x.svg

ln -s deepsea.svg xfce-x.svg

- Added libmtp-runtime and modified /etc/udev/rules.d/90-alsa-restore.rules

- Unchecked the box in desktop settings for showing fixed drives. (That box is new, thanks.)

- Thunar mounts disks. In the case of encrypted disks, it says it failed after you give the password, but the /dev/mapper device appears and clicking on it mounts it.

Atlante,

You might have a better time using the old-style sources.list. It makes it easier to find typographical errors like the one you made above which I can't find now. There was an extra space somewhere. That's in addition to the error message regarding "Types". I can't figure out what that one means.

You can use this for /etc/apt/sources.list and get rid of the devuan file in sources.list.d.

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur main non-free-firmware contrib non-free
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-updates  main non-free-firmware contrib non-free
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-security main non-free-firmware contrib non-free

All the live images use codenames in sources.list, so excalibur is/was/will be excalibur whether it's testing, stable or oldstable. The last few pre-release isos had excalibur-security and excalibur-updates enabled in addition to the main repo. You shouldn't need to change any of that.

You need to run 'apt update' to refresh the cache. Then you'll be able to search for packages. Run 'apt upgrade' to get whatever updates there are.

sources.list examples:
https://www.devuan.org/os/packages

Replace http with https and replace "deb.devuan.org" with "mirrors.dotsrc.org/devuan".

I don't usually look at the output you posted, so I can't sort out what you did wrong in sources.list. But I'll go ahead and guess - did you forget the /merged?

N: Unable to locate package systemd-standalone-users

It gets confusing with all the overlapping names. The correct name for that package is systemd-standalone-sysusers

# apt remove systemd-standalone-sysusers
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  libwtmpdb0  openssh-sftp-server
Use 'apt autoremove' to remove them.

REMOVING:
  cron  cron-daemon-common  openssh-server  systemd-standalone-sysusers

Installing opensysusers instead will remove systemd-standalone-sysusers without removing cron or ssh.
And either one of those will give you /usr/bin/systemd-sysusers.

Here's the fixed version of /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/90-alsa-restore.rules that you get in a netinstall of excalibur. The edit is hacked into the installer isos, so you won't get this fix on an upgrade from daedalus. And it might get clobbered if there's an upgrade to alsa.

The desktop-live iso got the upstream version, which has a few other changes. I hope that doesn't cause problems. That file is in /etc/udev/rules.d so if it does cause trouble, it can be removed without breaking anything.

This replaces /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/90-alsa-restore.rules
or better, put it in  /etc/udev/rules.d/90-alsa-restore-rules

# do not edit this file, it will be overwritten on update

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="sound", KERNEL=="controlC*", KERNELS!="card*", TEST=="/usr/sbin", TEST=="/usr/share/alsa", GOTO="alsa_restore_go"
GOTO="alsa_restore_end"

LABEL="alsa_restore_go"

ENV{ALSA_CARD_NUMBER}="$attr{device/number}"

# mark HDA analog card; HDMI/DP card does not have capture devices
DRIVERS=="snd_hda_intel", TEST=="device/pcmC$env{ALSA_CARD_NUMBER}D0p", RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo ALSA_CARD_HDA_ANALOG=$env{ALSA_CARD_NUMBER} >> /run/udev/alsa-hda-analog-card'"

# check for ACP hardware
TEST=="device/device/acp3x-dmic-capture", GOTO="alsa_hda_analog"
TEST=="device/device/acp6x-dmic-capture", GOTO="alsa_hda_analog"
TEST=="device/device/acp63-dmic-capture", GOTO="alsa_hda_analog"
TEST=="device/device/acp-dmic-codec", GOTO="alsa_hda_analog"
GOTO="alsa_restore_std"

LABEL="alsa_hda_analog"
# restore configuration for profile with combined cards (HDA + digital mic)
TEST!="/run/udev/alsa-hda-analog-card", GOTO="alsa_restore_std"
IMPORT{program}="/usr/bin/cat /run/udev/alsa-hda-analog-card"
ENV{ALSA_CARD_HDA_ANALOG}!="", ENV{ALSA_CARD_NUMBER}="$env{ALSA_CARD_HDA_ANALOG}"

LABEL="alsa_restore_std"
TEST!="/etc/alsa/state-daemon.conf", TEST=="/usr/sbin/alsactl", RUN+="/usr/sbin/alsactl -E HOME=/run/alsa -E XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/alsa/runtime restore $env{ALSA_CARD_NUMBER}"
TEST=="/etc/alsa/state-daemon.conf", TEST=="/usr/sbin/alsactl", RUN+="/usr/sbin/alsactl -E HOME=/run/alsa -E XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/alsa/runtime nrestore $env{ALSA_CARD_NUMBER}"

LABEL="alsa_restore_end"

Update (in case anyone else runs into this):  The other person who had trouble used Ventoy to prepare the usb, and apparently, it chose to use the syslinux bootloader in the iso rather than the grub bootloader, even though that computer only does uefi.

You must have looked at the page right before I updated it yesterday. Either that or you need to refresh the page in your browser. I uploaded new Refracta 13 (Excalibur) isos yesterday. Those are ready.
https://get.refracta.org/

For upgrades, I think the only preparation that's needed is that you should update/upgrade your daedalus and install the usrmerge package before changing sources to excalibur.  Refracta is Devuan with a different selection of packages and a few different settings. So it's ready for the next devuan release whenever the next devuan release is ready. And that happened two weeks ago.

I may as well mention it here because someone is sure to ask. "Why is it 13.1? What happened to 13.0?"
Answer: 13.0 was made two months ago and is still sitting on my hard drive. It never got uploaded while I was busy on the devuan release. So I made new ones.

https://get.refracta.org/files/stable/
https://get.refracta.org/files/testing/

The default installs of xfce and lxde pull in pulseaudio. KDE and mate pull in pipewire, but it doesn't work without some setup. See other recent discussions for details. I don't know what lxqt and gnome pull in.

If you install just the base system with no desktop, you can add whatever you want. Avoid the task-* packages if you want to be selective. You can have just alsa or alsa with either pipewire or pulseaudio.