Gnuinos rocked, genuen 6 Excalibur rocks. Incidentally, genuen ships with the linux-libre kernel and no non-free firmware. Not that aitor ever brags about his work. The results show and speak for themselves.

https://www.genuen.org

In the mean time I had given a try at MATE, also with s6, setup from the netinstall image, and added some legacy MATE themes excavated from the Mint archives, satisfying an enduring quaint foible of mine. Everything works, but clearly I got used to the xfce flavor.

aitor has legendary determination and attention to detail!

Absolutely. This is really amazing and encouraging.

A small glitch I almost missed on the 2026.10.21 xfce live images for runit and openrc: right after install a message says that xfce4-netaid-plugin and xfce4-avmix-plugin could not be loaded, without going into the specifics. I just went on without those plugins, but I will try to install again at some point and see what is wrong.

Failure trying to run: chroot "/target" dpkg --force-overwrite --force-confold --skip-same-version --install
/var/cache/apt/archives/libudev1-compat_3.2.19+really3.2.14-1+genuen6u1.deb

The log on tty4 also had:

installing libudev1-compat:amd64 would break libudev1:amd64 and deconfiguration is not permitted (--auto-deconfigure might help)

✔️ runit+lxde
✔️ runit+xfce
✔️ openrc+lxde
❌ openrc+xfce: error while installing the system through text installer

NOTE: on the xfce edition, the value for XkbLayout from /etc/default/keyboard gets parsed by the default Xkbmap session startup script, but the value for XkbVariant is ignored. I deactivated that startup script, so the keyboard conf file I created in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d gets parsed instead and all is flowing smoothly on genuen 6 Excalibur OpenRC+Xfce, version 2026.09.26.

The only thing I have not been able to do yet is to change the keyboard layout. I ran dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration and the /etc/default/keyboard file now reflects the chosen options. However, the keyboard layout only changed after adding the layout manager to the panel and selecting a different layout from there. This gets reset after logout, so I am trying to find a way to change it system-wide.

UPDATE: since setxkbmap only changes the layout for the current session, I created a configuration file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d in order to get X to grab the desired layout at startup. This (expectedly) also changes the keyboard layout for the user password prompt.

A follow-up from a previous discussion, I have noticed that ntpdate-debian works while ntpdate returns ntpdig: no eligible servers. I did not have time to experiment further with ntpdate yet, but I was thinking it may be related to running in a VM. I just run ntpdate-debian instead if needed.

UPDATE: ntpdate does not use config files, so it needs a server as argument: ntpdate pool.ntp.org works.

FURTHER UPDATE: the date/time does not need to be set manually on the 2026.09.11 images. Thank you Aitor!

A minor glitch that I forgot to mention earlier, clicking on the directory menu in the panel right after install currently brings a popup with the following content:

This is of course easily fixed by removing Directory Menu from the panel and adding it again.