After Devuan is installed make sure the shim packages are installed.  If they are, it appears that it doesn't matter if secure boot is on or off.  In order to install Devuan, turn secure boot off, but after it's up and running, it no longer appears to matter how it's set.  In order to install nVidia drivers secure boot must be off or else you will have to supply the paths to both private and public keys.  I don't know where those keys are kept, but the driver loaded with secure boot off and I'm not going to fiddle with it any more.

My problem was actually something else entirely.  Linux and VMD are incompatible.  Turn VMD off in the UEFI/BIOS.  Once it is off, the Devuan installer can detect the SSD(s) and you can partition them normally.

If you are dual booting an ASUS laptop (and maybe desktop) see this web page for valuable insights:  https://asus-linux.org/guides/intro/

I also turned off hibernation and fast boot.  Note these are Windows settings, not BIOS.  There's another fast boot in UEFI/BIOS and just to be sure, I turned that one off, too.

They haven't released any app to begin with. They have a "reference implementation of the Age Verification solution" that you can build yourself for Android and iOS if you're interested in making a proper solution yourself.

https://github.com/eu-digital-identity- … -wallet-ui
https://github.com/eu-digital-identity- … -wallet-ui

But hey, who cares about the facts these days anyway. It seems to be more important to write articles that generate clicks and money.

A picture is worth a thousand words:
https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/log/unstable-banned.svg

See also this page on GNU/Linux distros and other OSes that have spoken about it (so far).

Here's what I see from Firefox: 

I'm not suggesting a change -- but I am sympathetic to those feeling troubled by this.  File under "https is a pain and it's not the only way to secure things".

[edit: To explain the above quote, DNS round robin came up with ftp.fau.de in this case, which correctly doesn't have a cert for deb.devuan.org.  sledjhamr has a cert.

But have I misunderstood OP's concern?  Was the concern that deb.devuan.org redirected to sledjhamr.org instead of sledjhamr.org/devuan/  ?  In that case, is the concern about equal for redirecting to ftp.fau.de instead of ftp.fau.de/devuan/ ?

Some mirrors are foo.blah.tld/ and some are foo.blah.tld/devuan.  Apt must be handling that automatically.
]

How is the Devuan default of XFCE look so darn good? I'm on Excalibur btw. Is it a custom theme or something? I like it better than most heavy DEs I've tried. I'm still two weeks in on my honeymoon phase but so far I really like this deployment.

Some examples...

Upper left drop down is cleaner than most XFCEs which try to bloat the launcher box. The icon choices are familiar but I don't remember them in XFCE previously. Were they from Plasma? The frames, the tone and the speed all just match. Normally XFCE attempts look like grandmas quilt.

My most recent example is a Samsung TV with relatively new software which very often lost contact with the net. You had to restart the TV all the time. And on top of that, the cumbersome UI.

A real Linux PC has many advantages; Easier configuration of the network (DNS in this case), easier to watch like Youtube without ads,  if so inclined you can watch several shows, clips, videos at once. (Freedom). And play a game at the same time, and check your mail, and google stuff. And read the Devuan forum too.

With wireless keyboard and mouse, you can lay back in your couch and enjoy life.

And in this backwards world of ours, a TV without the "Smartness" would be more expensive than a TV with Smartness.

The one drawback, is that your mind might become even more fragmented.

I have in fact heard that was a purpose for s6, to do systemd on a lightweight level.

Devuan can be installed on the VisionFive 2 (v1.3b) with an EFI/Grub setup without problems using the mini.iso (see #6 above) copied to a USB. The installed system runs as intended.

The only (recommended) deviations from a normal install path are (i) use expert install, (ii) pre partition the target media with an EFI/ESP partition and (iii) use manual partitioning. (When using expert mode you will be asked to install Grub but not when using standard mode, it seems. In the latter case you need to go through the chroot steps outlined in #8 above.)

The above has been tested with Excalibur and install target on USB and nvme.

Several of the things I wrote/concluded in previous posts are u-boot dependent (and thus only apply to my particular setup). With a newer version of u-boot the install and management is simpler; in particular one can then use the bootflow command.

It is recommended to install a newer upstream/mainline version of u-boot >= 2025.01 and to reset u-boot env. (I'm on u-boot 2025.10 with openSBI 1.6 now.) It is also recommended to compile u-boot with a complete bootflow command, see https://docs.u-boot.org/en/latest/usage … tflow.html If you don't want to compile u-boot yourself, follow Debian's steps in the link in post #8. (The Debian pkg with u-boot for VF2 may however have the plain bootflow command, IDK.)

Notes: Cursor up/down problems in serial console (e.g. tio) can sometimes be resolved by deattaching the serial console, resetting the underlying terminal and then reattaching the serial console. (VF2 expects speed 115200.) There is a bug affecting u-boot's usb stability on the VF2 https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/ … 03599.html The workaround is to first do a "usb reset" before any usb commands at the u-boot prompt.

Edit (260216): Freia works too; tested install to nvme. (Had to manually edit /etc/inittab and set

S0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS0 115200 screen

to get serial console working).

I don't consider Devuan a "distro", I consider it an online provider of Linux packages for me to use to build a distro. That's it. Possibly it might help some folks to look at it that way.

I consider it my job to update outdated packages when needed, add third-party software and some of my own apps, to fix little bugs and behavior, to dot the i's and cross the t's, to design the system to be user-friendly and stable.

Devuan's basically Home Depot, and i'm a carpenter. Systemd is warped lumber and Debian is fine with forcing it on you, while Devuan chooses to pitch out as much of it as they can.