I'm pretty sure that everything in /run will be regenerated on reboot. If you changed permissions on the executables in /sbin, those won't revert. You should do that manually.

Instead of changing permissions, you could give your user sudo privs without password for just the required commands. Then you can use those commands in destkop launchers without having to enter a password.
I have something like this in /etc/sudoers.d/usercommands. (Hint: visudo /etc/sudoers.d/usercommands)

Cmnd_Alias	HALT = /sbin/shutdown, /sbin/halt, /sbin/poweroff, /sbin/reboot
Cmnd_Alias	NET = /sbin/ifconfig, /sbin/ifup, /sbin/ifdown

fred    ALL=NOPASSWD: HALT, NET

For brightness, your user can run xrandr.

# $monitor1 is the name of the connected monitor from xrandr without any options.
# $bright1 is a number between 0.0 and 1.0. 
xrandr --output $monitor1 --brightness "$bright1"

...sooner than I thought.

There are two memtest entries in the boot menus. One for memtest86+x64.efi and one for memtest86+x64.bin. Both appear in the legacy boot menu (isolinux) and the uefi boot menu (grub). I'm interested to hear which one works in which situations.

For me, just the .efi version works in both legacy and uefi boots. The .bin gives me some nice dot patterns that scroll off the screen to be replaced with black.

Excalibur desktop-live:
https://files.devuan.org/devuan_excalib … p-live.iso

Excalibur minimal-live:
https://files.devuan.org/devuan_excalib … l-live.iso

sha256sums:

d301d0e4eb31e7b4e8dee9cee5fdc9a74763d61ff95a1a18a456991905500206  devuan_excalibur_6.0-preview-2025-05-19_1437_amd64_desktop-live.iso

149e3538d01c76d8f6393fcc871167f221e2582e0dca3221ed8750b8bf01e27e  devuan_excalibur_6.0-preview-2025-05-19_1919_amd64_minimal-live.iso

I'm sure it's available because I've made a few excalibur i386 live-isos and included xfe.

2.0.1-1 is installed on my EEE and 2.0.1-2 is available in excalibur and ceres.

If you want it on chimaera, there's a chance that the excal deb will install. If not, you'd need to download the source from salsa.debian and backport it to chimaera. But if you want 2.1, you'll probably have to get the upstream non-debianized source and either package it or compile it behind your package manager's back.

Start with df -h which will show your mounted partitions with their size and amount used. Pay particular attention to the percentage used on your root filesystem. If it goes beyond 95% you're likely to have problems. If anything is too full, find some big files to delete.

You might run apt-cache autoclean to get rid of old deb packages in /var/cache/apt/archives or even apt-cache clean to get rid of all the deb packages in that directory. Note that this will not uninstall any programs. It just remove the .deb packages, so if you needed to reinstall something, you'd need to pull it from the repository. (i.e. the way most people install packages most of the time.)

Altoid,

dd to the whole device, /dev/sdg, not to the partition.

Works ok on 1101HA, bios version 0317
I'm using a cheap, no-name giveaway usb stick dd'd with devuan_chimaera_4.0.2_i386_desktop-live.iso.

patch-initrd works
patch-initrd with encrypted loopback file on first partition works.
loopback file on second partition works with and without encryption
reinstall syslinux works. It hung for a long time running mmove using 100% cpu, and I ended up killing that process, but it worked anyway. I suspect the problem was my usb stick that was already having booting problems. Seems to be fixed now.

There were a couple of times I tried to make a loopback file on the second partition, but it never asked which partition to use, and it wanted to put it on the first. I closed refracta2usb and restarted it, and it did what I wanted after that.

All testing done on excalibur host with a devuan excalibur desktop-live iso. (i.e. with microcode)

Thank you! I've been dreading touching that script to make any changes. I can test it. I'm using it frequently now that I'm making excalibur isos. Maybe we should both put what we have on git.devuan.org for merging the changes.

What is /root/dev? Why is it trying to mount there?

I was probably root when I ran the installer.

It was the rootfs_overlay that had lib/live/config/ and two custom scripts that was interfering with the symlink. I changed it to usr/lib/live/config and it's all better. Uploading new iso to the same directory now. Release docs and motd need refreshing, but other than that, I think it's good to go. If you happen to have a braille display, please test.

It finally finished uploading and the sha256sum is good.

248b64b2bca77de3a2d1f8582049d604d007004fa31487409fb8fe3bfc00e15d  devuan_excalibur_6.0-preview-2025-04-14_2142_amd64_minimal-live.iso

I added the usrmerge part incorrectly the first time.  The option is "--merged-usr" - but doing that correctly didn't help.

Running the build functions manually one at a time worked except for the xorriso part, but running xorriso manually did work, and I got a bootable iso. All the live-* scripts are there, but the efi part didn't get made.  And it seems like the espeak stuff isn't working, but I'll need to boot it on hardware to be sure.  I'll compare the build scripts for the desktop-live and minimal-live and see if I can cobble one that works.