1 that xserver-xlibre-video-qxl wasn't installed (I had chosen qxl as emulated video card), and

2. that /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nouveau.conf was present and forced nouveau.

I moved away the latter and installed the former, and then it appeared to work.

I have been investigating the "blinking cursor" issue ((EE) No devices detected / no screens found) in Qemu/KVM, and I wanted to share my findings and what I have ruled out so far.

What I have verified:

    The bug is specific to the ISO environment: I have successfully upgraded older existing installations on physical machines with both UEFI and BIOS, and they boot and work perfectly. But, when booting the new live iso in Qemu and some physical machines, it indeed stalls at the blinking cursor right after loading the system services.

Technical details & What has been ruled out:

To isolate the issue, I have performed several tests on the live image configuration, ruling out the most obvious changes:

1) Not a Secure Boot / Kernel issue: I am aware that the custom genuen certificate (generated to bypass the MS-signed Debian certificate) has expired, and I haven't resigned the linux-libre kernel yet (as my initial Secure Boot attempts failed). However, this is 100% unrelated to this bug since Secure Boot is disabled in your VMs, the kernel boots perfectly, and services initialize normally before the crash. If it were a signature issue, UEFI would have blocked the boot way earlier.

2) Not a vdev or xlibre issue: I tried reverting vdev back to eudev, and swapping xlibre back to stock X11. The blinking cursor persisted. The issue does not stem from either of them.

3) Not the latest display tweaks: I tried completely removing the nouveau.modeset=1 kernel parameter and deleting a custom configuration file I added under /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/. Surprisingly, the error remains. Most other recent changes are strictly constrained to vdev and libudev-compat on the one hand, and simple-netaid and avmix (formerly amixer-gtk) on the other hand (including their respective xfce-panel plugins).

4) List of Banned Packages Expansion: Another major change in this iso was tightening the package blacklist in Amprolla, strictly following the FSF's  https://libreplanet.org/wiki/list_of_so … Guidelines. While I don't think this should break Xorg directly, it is something to keep in mind regarding potential underlying dependency drops.

Current status:

This is quite mysterious, as the underlying system seems to be completely functional, but Xorg fails to detect the emulated virtual screens in Qemu.
I am still digging deeper into the ISO build configuration to find out why the virtual graphic drivers are failing to load on this specific build. In the meantime, if anyone can try booting the live image with the nomodeset kernel parameter added to GRUB, please let me know if it allows you to bypass the cursor.

Thank you all for your patience and support. I will keep you updated!

I still have a working genuen VM image installed from scratch using an iso from May 2026. I also have another one upgraded at the time from gnuinos-runit to genuen, which works remarkably well.
Something amiss with the iso image, I would guess.

First, I would like to take the opportunity to thank the whole Devuan community for their hard work, and especially Aitor for his sustained work on genuen (previously known as gnuinos) and for his active support all along the way.

Since we are here, I would also like to report that after creating a VM with the latest version (2026.06.20) of the genuen 6 iso image, I am currently not able to start a graphical session. I will try tweaking the VM settings, but am currently left with a blinking cursor. The Xorg.0.log file says:

[2026-06-20 08:10:03] (EE) No devices detected.
[2026-06-20 08:10:03] no screens found

The VM was installed with the same settings as the previous genuen ISO image: LVM and encryption, QEMU/KVM on virt-manager and integrated Intel graphics.