Good day, everyone! It's been quite a long time since I've messed with Refracta OS. Mine needs updated, and I am upgrading my computer soon, so I will need the latest and greatest kernel for that hardware very shortly as well for a separate build. So I have some questions. I will number them below for easy answering. Please be aware that I am a very nooby Linux user. I'm trying to dabble more in Linux to eventually rid myself of Windows in the near future. So hopefully your answers are idiot-proof haha.

- 1.) I tried a couple/few months ago to install Refracta OS onto a hard drive using the Live USB with Refracta Installer. I have multiple hard drives attached, and this was a brand new one that I wanted to use the BIOS to select that drive to boot from. So I was trying to get Refracta OS installed and to boot from that drive. But I ran into some issues. Once Refracta OS was installed on the drive, I couldn't get it to boot. I tried a couple different things, but couldn't get Refracta to boot from that drive. Seems like a boot manager problem, and I probably wasn't doing it right from the installer. I just couldn't get the boot manager/boot loader to install on that drive for some reason. Be advised that I don't have any issues installing bigger distros like Mint, Fedora, etc.

Another issue with this I ran into, I was trying to split the drive in half (128 GB and 128 GB partitions), to have Refracta OS on one partition, and then another Linux distro on the second partition to try out different distros (this is a Windows PC). But I couldn't get Refracta Installer to install Refracta OS to one of the two partitions. It would only install if the drive was one single partition. Again, probably my noobiness on not how to make the installer install to one of the partitions on the drive. Seemed like it just wasn't giving me the option or wasn't willing to install to one of the separate partitions. Which was weird, since it had no problem installing to that drive it it was a single partition. Or do I have to install Refracta OS, then shrink the partition to be able to create a second partition?

- 2.) Besides Refracta OS, I keep seeing Excalibur/Ceres being mentioned here on the forums. Are these also derivatives of Devuan? From what I'm understanding, Excalibur/Ceres also have Refracta Tools installed with them already? I wouldn't mind trying these out either.

- 3.) As for my mention of needing the latest kernel for the latest drivers, one great OS for the latest kernels is Fedora, from my understanding. I used to have a website saved that mentioned how to install the dependencies for Refracta Tools, so that you could install those on virtually any Linux distro. Would you have those commands and/or what would be needed to install the dependencies to get Refracta Tools installed into say Fedora or Mint, etc.? That way I can open up my OS options to any distro as long as it can utilize Refracta Tools.

My end goal is a light distro where I can have all of my hardware drivers (including video drivers) installed, video codecs for VLC player. And a browser. Don't need a whole lot of bloat much from that.

Thanks for reading this wall of text, and appreciate any help on getting a light distro with Refracta Tools working on this 3 year old PC and a brand new 2025 PC here in another month or so.

ISSUE 1: Refracta OS (and Devuan Beowulf also)
I already mentioned this on the Devuan part of the forum, but I just built a new AMD system this week based on an X570 motherboard and 5900x CPU. I installed Refracta OS and even Devuan Beowulf (alongside Windows on a separate partition) and could not get either the WiFi nor the Ethernet to work. So that means no updating or installing. This is not an issue on Ubuntu-based distros.

This was also not an issue on my previous AMD system with a B450 motherboard and 3700x CPU. Just for reference, this new system has the Intel WiFi 6 AX200 160 Mhz chip, and Realtek PCIe 2.5GbE Ethernet chip. Just wanted to report this issue for future updates of Devuan. I enjoy using Devuan/Refracta OS on one of my PC's as a lightweight distro that just works well. However with no networking, that is currently not possible on newer systems. I'm also a Linux noob, so I won't be doing any building of driver packages, etc.

ISSUE 2: Refracta Snapshot issues on Linux Mint
So because I couldn't get Refracta OS nor Devuan working with networking, I installed Linux Mint. I was able to get Refracta Snapshot installed with dependencies but ran into a couple of issues.

1.) After installing Refracta base and GUI (latest versions), the icon to start the GUI in the start menu would not start the program. Clicking on it caused nothing to happen. However, when running the base and GUI from the command line, they both ran just fine. Not a major issue.

2.) This one is more of a bigger issue: After getting Refracta Snapshot running on Mint, I was trying to do a test image just to make sure it was working properly. After doing the config files and started the Snapshot, I got an error that said "Missing kernel_image and/or initrd_image" and then making sure the config file was pointing to the correct location for these in the config file.

So I searched and found this post on this forum where he changed the location of those two files to "/boot" in the config as that is where they are located in Ubuntu and Mint (as far as my noobness can tell and the other poster also mentions). However, after changing the locations of the files in the config file, I was still getting the same error. So now I'm stuck lol.