Thanks for the reminder. I just tried it with an excalibur desktop-live iso and memtest86+x64.efi works here on two computers in legacy boot mode and two computers in uefi mode. (That's a total of three computers - one of them can be switched easily between uefi and legacy at boot).

The .bin file doesn't boot for me on any of them.

I think I'll make two boot menu entries - one for .efi and one for .bin. Excalibur preview live-isos will be posted soon.

It's probably thunar-volman that does this (or doesn't). We don't fork that package, so any bug reports should go to bugs.debian.org. It's also a good idea to find out if the same behavior exists in debian before filing a bug report. Before you do that, consider that the two most recent bug reports on thunar-volman are from 2021 and 2013 and neither one got a response. I also didn't see any bugs on thunar that were relevant and recent.

USB 2.0.

It also booted with a refracta excalibur iso (with libre kernel).

Is desktop-base installed? Check in synaptic package manager or run dpkg -l desktop-base. If it's not there, then install it.

apt install desktop-base
dpkg -L desktop-base  # This will show you all the files in that package.

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.