It is possible to install a base system using the netinstall iso without a network connection. You get a very minimal system, and you'd have to set up the network manually after rebooting into the system. Get the firmware package from the installer usb or the iso file mounted on the system.

Is there any chance you could run the installer again and get a screenshot or camera shot of the screen that asks you to supply the wireless driver on usb stick? I'd like to have that for reference, but I can't reproduce it easily. Thanks.

Did you try proceeding without providing the driver on external usb? Daedalus and Excalibur netinstall isos do have wifi support. The firmware packages are all in the iso and will be installed if your hardware requires them. The live isos have wireless firmware already installed.

In most cases the install will be easier if you ignore that question about loading firmware from removable media. Most of the firmware packages are on the disk. (e.g. firmware-realtek). That question is a leftover inherited from debian when they did not include non-free firmware in the isos. It's only useful for a few drivers that require you to agree not to share them before they let you have them. (e.g. some broadcom chips) and only if you're installing without a network connection.

MLEvD, did you copy/paste the wrong commands? That dd command will replace whatever is on the partition with a file containing zeroes. That would reproduce the OP's problem instead of fixing it.

linux-libre 6.15.0 with the current version of mount (2.41-5devuan1) is working correctly. Here's an iso in case anyone wants to play with it.
https://get.refracta.org/files/experime … 0_1739.iso

sha256sum

4d19d4a9f1f28eb5548fc3b141f83fece1a9df0640cdb6bbc63a528944b41306  refracta_13_minx_ndb_libre_i386-20250530_1739.iso

Install openbox and do a diff on the files you're curious about against the ones in /etc/xdg/openbox. (probably menu.xml and rc.xml)

FWIW, not related to the installer isos, but refractasnapshot has a config option for enabling uefi boot or not. (you always get legacy boot) It's just a matter of turning on or off one (I think it's just one) function. Oh yeah, the devuan-live isos have the same option because the same function is used in live-sdk.

To test those other config files,  drop them in ~/.config/openbox/ and fire up an openbox session.

I'll try to expain for you folks who aren't getting it. If you install a desktop environment from the installer iso, it uses a metapackage such as task-xfce-desktop or other desktop, which pulls in all parts of the chosen DE plus all other desktop applications. Trying to remove some parts of that will often result in the whole desktop being removed.

If you start with a minimal system, you can add the parts of the desktop that you want along with the specific applications that you want and have a leaner system than you would get with the task-* package.

Example: How do you install kde without getting libreoffice or gimp? Partial answer: You don't install task-kde-desktop.

$ apt depends task-kde-desktop
task-kde-desktop
  Depends: tasksel (= 3.73devuan1)
  Depends: task-desktop
  Depends: kde-standard
 |Depends: lightdm
 |Depends: slim
  Depends: sddm
  Recommends: kdeaccessibility
  Recommends: orca
  Recommends: gimp
  Recommends: libreoffice-writer
  Recommends: libreoffice-calc
  Recommends: libreoffice-impress
  Recommends: libreoffice-plasma
  Recommends: libreoffice-kf5
  Recommends: libreoffice-help-en-us
  Recommends: mythes-en-us
  Recommends: hunspell-en-us
  Recommends: hyphen-en-us
  Recommends: print-manager
 |Recommends: <time-daemon>
    chrony
    ntpsec
    openntpd
  Recommends: ntpsec-ntpdate

About that size issue...
I poked around a bit. Most of the difference is in /lib/modules and most of that is drivers. libre has more directories and files there than debian and all the .ko files in the debian kernel are xz-compressed. That accounts for around 200mb difference.

Update. If I downgrade to the previous version of mount, the isos boot. (i.e. they can loop-mount filesystem.squashfs)

mount, fdisk libfdisk1 and uuid-runtime were all downgraded from 2.41-5devuan1 to 2.38.1-5+deb12u3devuan1

I filed a bug report against mount - https://bugs.devuan.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=892

I think you make a good case for turning mdadm off in the live isos. Easy enough to do.
In /etc/default/mdadm

# START_DAEMON:
#   should mdadm start the MD monitoring daemon during boot?
START_DAEMON=false

If you need mdadm in the live session, turn it on with /etc/init.d/mdadm start
Now all I gotta do is remember to put it in the release notes.

Might be better to make a hook script so it could be turned on or off at the boot command. (talking to myself now)

"su" vs. "su -" problem? Those usually give you a "command not found" error. More likely the environment issue (root vs. user)

If you want to be able to run root programs on the user's desktop like you used to do before su got moved into util-linux, do this:

echo "Always_set_path yes" >> /etc/default/su

Then log out and log in using "su" and compare your PATH to what it was before. (or try to run a graphical app as root)

Feel free to use this. No gui stuff. (I actually dissected it out of a gui app. You'll recognize some of it.) And yes, this uses dd.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
#
# iso2usb.sh
#set -x
#
# Run this script from the directory that contains your .iso files.
#

blocksize="1M"

[[ $(id -u) -eq 0 ]] || { echo -e "\n\t You need to be root!\n" ; exit 1 ; }

usbdevlist=$(/usr/sbin/hwinfo --usb --short | awk '/dev\/sd/ {print $1}')
usbdevfulllist=$(/usr/sbin/hwinfo --usb --short | awk '/dev\/sd/ {print $0}')

	echo -e "\n\tLIST OF REMOVABLE DRIVES\n${usbdevfulllist}\n${sdfulllist}\n${cdromfulllist}\n\nSelect a device:"
	select opt in $usbdevlist ; do
		device=$(echo "$opt" | awk '{ print $1 }')
		break
	done

if [[ -z "$device" ]] ; then
	echo "No device was found."
	exit 0
fi

echo -e "\n\tSelect the image file.\n"
select file in *.iso *.img ; do
	echo -e "\n$file"
	break
done

size=$(ls -lh $file | awk '{ print $5 }' | sed -e 's/M//')

if echo "$size" | grep -q G ; then
	size="$(echo "$size" | sed -e 's/\.//' -e 's/G//')00"
fi

echo "Size is ${size}M"

if echo "$size" | grep -q K ; then
	echo "Out of range units"
	exit 1
fi

echo -e "\n\tCopy $file to $device?\n\n\tThe command will be:\n\tdd if=$file | pv -s ${size}M | dd of=$device bs=${blocksize}\n\n"
echo -e " Press ENTER to continue or ctrl-c to abort."
read -p " "

dd if="$file" | pv -s ${size}M | dd of="$device" bs="$blocksize"
sync

exit 0