Looks good in meld. I haven't tried it yet.

Don't know if this helps, but refractasnapshot now uses unmkinitramfs to extract initrd. It's simpler code. Here's the relevant commit.
https://git.devuan.org/devuan/refractas … 7d53f7d9d8

xfe - lightweight file manager that also includes xfw text editor. They each use about 9 MB RAM.

qlipper - simple clipboard similar to parcellite. Uses about 20 MB and works without dbus-bin or dbus-daemon installed.

links2 or dillo for graphical web browsers. Any of the big ones are too painful when you only have 2 GB RAM and 1.33 GHz Atom CPU. Sometimes lynx or w3m will suffice.

claws-mail - 49 MB compared to thunderbird's 307 MB.

Code for forked packages is here:
https://git.devuan.org/devuan/policykit-1

You can also get devuan package information from here:
https://pkginfo.devuan.org/cgi-bin/policy-query.html

If you can't find an associated package on our git, check salsa.debian.org.

Some packages are missing in that last iso. They're the ones that were excluded in the debootstrap command, and I forgot to add them back in. If you do install from that iso, make sure you install logrotate and rsyslog. That will also pull in cron.

The other issue is that "username=devuan" isn't on the command line, and /etc/sudoers.d/live gives sudo nopasswd permissions to the non-existent user named "user". If you install the system, edit or delete that file.

I left out the section of the build that edits initrd to remove unnecessary stuff to make it smaller. Seems to be 47mb either way. With all the software bloat, the "minimal" live iso no longer fits on a CD. It's more than 47mb over the limit, so trimming initrd isn't going to help.

New iso:
https://get.refracta.org/files/experime … l-live.iso

sha256sum
https://get.refracta.org/files/experime … iso.sha256

8278bc1c1af87d538d73efb64534c076bdd3ecaeba27a1eb20cdc49e5b701660  devuan_excalibur_6.0-preview-2025-04-15_0923_amd64_minimal-live.iso

Making encrypted partitions in d-i is a confusing process. For reference, here's a video of making an unencrypted boot partition and an encrypted root partition.  The "-4" at the end of the filename is the number of attempts I made until I did it right. I screw it up about half the times I do it.

https://distro.ibiblio.org/refracta/mis … rypt-4.ogv

If your mate install includes desktop-base, you'll need to wait for version 5.9 to move down to excalibur. (Or pull it from ceres)

My 32-bit netbook thinks it's a good idea. It already has convinced me to work on a similar project. I merged it with my project to update my nodbus build, which turned out to be more difficult than expected. A bunch of stuff that used to install without dbus will no longer comply with such a restriction. That includes spacefm.    I think xfe is the only graphical file manager that doesn't want dbus.

Anyway, if you want to look at any of what I've done, we can talk. If you do make one, I'm sure it'll be leaner than mine.

The real issue is the web browser. None of the big ones are fun to use with only 2G of memory. Falkon uses more than firefox which uses more than chromium. Hundreds of megabytes with one page open. Leave that out and you just eliminated a huge security risk.

Also regarding security - encrypted filesystems only work when the computer is turned off.

I was able to get to the xfce backgrounds dir. You can't select a file from that settings dialog. It only lets you choose a directory, then it shows thumbnails.

Wow, I didn't notice the inird. I looked inside and it's around 90mb of firmware, 60 of which are nvidia.

I can't find where xfce sets the desktop background. For one thing, some of the files in /etc/xdg/xfce4 have changed. The default bg image is xfce-x.svg. I grepped for that in /etc/xdg/xfce4 in ~/.config/xfce4 and in /usr/share/xfce4 and found nothing. Got the same looking for "monitor" and "last-image".  "workspace" shows up for keybindings, but not for bg image.

xfce4-desktop.xml in the user's configs is nearly empty. (see below)
The source code contains stuff about randr, so it must figure out the monitor while it's loading and injects it into the user's config file.

I'm feeling pretty much hopeless about this, and maybe the idea of replacing the default background image is not so bad if it can be done with dpkg-divert. Or maybe the old desktop-base we're using needs to be updated to the newer version in debian. That hasn't been done since it was first forked. I don't have the time, energy or motivation to do that.

Here are some tree outputs from excalibur with the default xfce files without desktop-base. If anyone wants to examine the actual files without going through doing an install, I can post a couple tarballs.

In /etc/xdg/xfce4:

xdg-excalibur/
└── xdg
    ├── autostart
    │   ├── xfce4-clipman-plugin-autostart.desktop
    │   ├── xfce4-notes-autostart.desktop
    │   ├── xfce4-notifyd.desktop
    │   ├── xfce4-power-manager.desktop
    │   ├── xfce4-screensaver.desktop
    │   └── xfsettingsd.desktop
    ├── menus
    │   ├── xfce4-screensavers.menu
    │   ├── xfce-applications.menu
    │   └── xfce-settings-manager.menu
    ├── Thunar
    │   └── uca.xml
    └── xfce4
        ├── helpers.rc
        ├── panel
        │   ├── default.xml
        │   └── xfce4-clipman-actions.xml
        ├── whiskermenu
        │   └── defaults.rc
        ├── xfconf
        │   └── xfce-perchannel-xml
        │       ├── xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts.xml
        │       ├── xfce4-power-manager.xml
        │       ├── xfce4-session.xml
        │       └── xsettings.xml
        ├── Xft.xrdb
        └── xinitrc

In user's ~/.config/

└── xfce4
    ├── desktop
    │   ├── accels.scm
    │   ├── icons.screen0-1008x671.rc
    │   ├── icons.screen0-1008x672.rc
    │   ├── icons.screen0-1008x703.rc
    │   ├── icons.screen0-1008x721.rc
    │   ├── icons.screen0-1008x722.rc
    │   ├── icons.screen0-1008x752.rc
    │   └── icons.screen0.yaml
    ├── panel
    │   ├── cpugraph-17.rc
    │   ├── cpugraph-17.rc.2308.tmp
    │   ├── launcher-13
    │   │   └── 17429900681.desktop
    │   ├── launcher-14
    │   │   └── 17429900682.desktop
    │   ├── launcher-15
    │   │   └── 17429900683.desktop
    │   ├── launcher-16
    │   │   └── 17429900684.desktop
    │   ├── launcher-20
    │   │   ├── 15227719791.desktop
    │   │   ├── 15227720282.desktop
    │   │   ├── 15227720744.desktop
    │   │   ├── 15239594091.desktop
    │   │   └── 15240025661.desktop
    │   ├── netload-16.rc
    │   ├── xkb-plugin-18.rc
    │   └── xkb-plugin-18.rc.2309.tmp
    ├── terminal
    │   ├── accels.scm
    │   └── terminalrc
    ├── xfce4-screenshooter
    ├── xfconf
    │   └── xfce-perchannel-xml
    │       ├── accessibility.xml
    │       ├── displays.xml
    │       ├── keyboards.xml
    │       ├── thunar.xml
    │       ├── xfce4-desktop.xml
    │       ├── xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts.xml
    │       ├── xfce4-notifyd.xml
    │       ├── xfce4-panel.xml
    │       ├── xfce4-session.xml
    │       ├── xfce4-session.xml.new
    │       ├── xfce4-settings-manager.xml
    │       ├── xfwm4.xml
    │       └── xsettings.xml
    └── xfwm4

Default user's xfce4-desktop.xml (yeah, that's the whole thing - it gets bigger if the user chooses a bg image.)

<?xml version="1.1" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<channel name="xfce4-desktop" version="1.0">
  <property name="last-settings-migration-version" type="uint" value="1"/>
</channel>

login:password on the live isos:

devuan:devuan
root:toor

also, sudo with no password is enabled.

@dev-1-dash-1: The default behavior for live-config was to have you logged in on all  six ttys automatically.  So if you dropped to console from the desktop, you would already be logged in.

I couldn't reproduce the problem you got with mc, but I'm adding LANG=C.UTF-8 to /etc/default/locale in the next build.

This is the same problem I was running into with no-X isos I'm building. It might be a live-config problem. Not sure. Ran into it with sysvinit and runit builds.

At the boot screen press TAB to edit the boot menu and add something...  (press e if it's a grub boot screen)

Add 'nottyautologin' and you will boot to the desktop with tty1-6 available with ctrl-alt-fn.
Add 'noautologin' and you will be booted to the graphical login screen. tty1-6 will work.

if you add 'nox11autologin' you'll get graphical login screen but no ttys.

I tried disabling the graphical desktop with various cominations of the above and also 'nocomponents=xinit,xserver-xorg,lightdm' but it keeps going to the desktop. Recently I made some live isos without a display manager and I was able to get it to boot to console login and stay there once I logged in. Without the nocomponents it would go right to the desktop when logging into console.