Since Debian Trixie (and by extension Excalibur) no longer has an i386 kernel, but still has other i386 packages, I've decided to make an ISO image which uses the linux-libre kernel (thanks to hacksenwerk). It's a bit scrappy, because there is a lot of cruft from this being an old project, and me having been more inexperienced. But it works. I would like to make it more solid sometime.

Note that due to technical limitations with live-setup/grub-mkrescue, the setup makes use of the Daedalus kernel, but the linux-libre kernel is used for the installed system.

* Features:
- Supports i386
- Custom installer that requires less memory to work than Devuan's vanilla setup
- Partition containing /home can easily be encrypted (swap is located in /home, so if encrypted, swap is encrypted too)
- Xfce desktop with defaults that are similar to Windows, composition disabled by default
- Live environment has desktop (go to bash and run startx)
- Lots of little tweaks that get rid of things I find annoying (like fading scrollbars)

The installer is not as easy to use as Devuan/Debian's, you need more experience about how disks need to be partitioned and formatted to have success.

* Source
* ISO (http) - sha256: 9e47f585866d7ff8a14dc8e6d219bae29b722cfce16353c118fb39f9f1507881

I make no guarantees whatsoever. Use at your own discretion.

I managed to create an i386 ISO of Devuan Excalibur, by using Devuan Daedalus' kernel. It is crazy how many packages are still available for i386, even Firefox, and other graphical packages. Seems like Debian Trixie is somewhat arbitrarily not building the kernel for i386...

It would be amazing if Devuan were to provide an official i386 kernel for Excalibur, because a lot of stuff still works.

If you want to recreate this, use debootstrap and bootstrap experimental (or excalibur, once it is out). Edit the /etc/sources.apt file like this:

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur main
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus main
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-security main

Do apt update, then you're able to install linux-image-686 or linux-image-686-pae. You probably want to add deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-security main on the second line, once it is out. Similar steps would probably work for Debian, too.

The only stable (non-excalibur) packages it installed for me, seem to be related to gnome's network manager applet, and the kernel itself of course. If you want to see which stable packages you ended up with, you can use: apt list --installed | grep "/stable"

If you want to download this, you can find the ISO here.

When running Devuan Chimaera/Daedalus in QEMU, configuring the keyboard layout like this does not change it (US layout):

dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
service console-setup.sh restart
udevadm trigger --subsystem-match=input --action=change
service keyboard-setup.sh restart

I've also had this happen on one particular Core 2 Duo era laptop, but it was a while ago. Is there anything else I can do? Using loadkeys de loads the correct layout, however, special characters like Ä/Ö/Ü/ß and so on will not work.

Hello everyone!

I've been trying to observe zswap's statistics. grep -R . /sys/kernel/debug/zswap/ is frequently recommended, but /sys/kernel/debug/zswap does not exist. I've made /etc/boot.d/user-zswap, it looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
zswap=/sys/module/zswap/parameters
echo 75 > $zswap/max_pool_percent
echo 95 > $zswap/accept_threshold_percent
echo zstd > $zswap/compressor
echo zsmalloc > $zswap/zpool
echo 1 > $zswap/enabled

I checked if zswap was compiled into my kernel based on some older post when zswap was new: cat /boot/config-$(uname -r) | grep CONFIG_ZSWAP= gives me CONFIG_ZSWAP=y.

I also checked if zswap itself is enabled: cat /sys/module/zswap/parameters/enabled is Y.

My kernel version is 5.10.0-20-amd64.

What am I missing?