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samarul

Member

Registered: 2023-06-15

Posts: 12  

Upgrading to Excalibur

Hello to you all!

Hope my message will not be considered as stupid. Now that Debian 13 is live is it safe to assume that upgrading to Excalibur means for Devuan the equivalent to upgrading to Debian 13?

Installing usrmerge and then doing a apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade is enough for a smooth upgrade from Daedalus or should I pay attention to something else also?

Thank you!

Last edited by samarul (2025-08-11 09:51:13)

Camtaf

Member

Registered: 2019-11-19

Posts: 491  

Re: Upgrading to Excalibur

Use the search function & you will find 2 other threads about it.....

ralph.ronnquist

Administrator

From: Battery Point, Tasmania, AUS

Registered: 2016-11-30

Posts: 1,462  

Re: Upgrading to Excalibur

Yes, it should be fine like that. Of course any dkms modules might play up.

I've also seen that some people have issues with their windowing programs with excalibur, but that's more of a post-upgrade concern.

samarul

Member

Registered: 2023-06-15

Posts: 12  

Re: Upgrading to Excalibur

Thank you! I'll give it a try.

rbit

Member

Registered: 2018-06-12

Posts: 69  

Re: Upgrading to Excalibur

Here are some other issues to be aware of https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/ … ssues.html - although not all of these apply to devuan.

Last edited by rbit (2025-08-11 15:19:19)

samarul

Member

Registered: 2023-06-15

Posts: 12  

Re: Upgrading to Excalibur

Thank you for the links with the issues. I think there is one that could be really a trouble - my /boot partition has only 487M and is not in a logical volume. Should I try to resize it or in devuan will be enough?

ralph.ronnquist

Administrator

From: Battery Point, Tasmania, AUS

Registered: 2016-11-30

Posts: 1,462  

Re: Upgrading to Excalibur

I'm not sure what that issue is about; my excalibur boot directory is 100 Mb, though also not a separate partition. I think 487 Mb is plenty and it's certainly fine as a raw partition.

EDIT: I also have an EFI partition with <5 Mb bootloader (grub), which gets mounted as /boot/efi.

samarul

Member

Registered: 2023-06-15

Posts: 12  

Re: Upgrading to Excalibur

I looked on the link from above (https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/ … ssues.html) and it has this section

5.1.5. Ensure /boot has enough free space

The Linux kernel and firmware packages have increased considerably in size in previous Debian releases and in trixie. As a result your /boot partition might be too small, causing the upgrade to fail. If your system was installed with Debian 10 (buster) or earlier, your system is very likely to be affected.

Before starting the upgrade, make sure your /boot partition is at least 768 MB in size, and has about 300 MB free. If your system does not have a separate /boot partition, there should be nothing to do.

If /boot is in LVM and too small, you can use lvextend to increase the size of an LVM partition. if /boot is a separate partition it is likely easier to reinstall the system.

ralph.ronnquist

Administrator

From: Battery Point, Tasmania, AUS

Registered: 2016-11-30

Posts: 1,462  

Re: Upgrading to Excalibur

Hmm, yes I only have two kernels with their initrd, each pair being 12+32 Mb, so again, I don't understand what they refer to. That's standard Debian kernel+initrd adding up to 44 Mb each. So if you need more than 10 of them you might be in trouble.

EDIT: perhaps if you want lots of pre-pivot software it will enlarge initrd, and perhaps that'll then grow above 100Mb.

samarul

Member

Registered: 2023-06-15

Posts: 12  

Re: Upgrading to Excalibur

I also have 2 kernels

drwxr-xr-x  4 root 1.0K Aug 12 09:51 ./
drwxr-xr-x 22 root 4.0K Aug 11 13:21 ../
-rw-r--r--  1 root 254K May 18 15:01 config-6.1.0-36-amd64
-rw-r--r--  1 root 254K May 22 21:32 config-6.1.0-37-amd64
drwxr-xr-x  5 root 1.0K Aug 12 09:51 grub/
-rw-r--r--  1 root  47M Jun  6 09:26 initrd.img-6.1.0-36-amd64
-rw-r--r--  1 root  47M Jun 10 08:40 initrd.img-6.1.0-37-amd64
drwx------  2 root  12K May 23  2024 lost+found/
-rw-r--r--  1 root   83 May 18 15:01 System.map-6.1.0-36-amd64
-rw-r--r--  1 root   83 May 22 21:32 System.map-6.1.0-37-amd64
-rw-r--r--  1 root 7.9M May 18 15:01 vmlinuz-6.1.0-36-amd64
-rw-r--r--  1 root 7.9M May 22 21:32 vmlinuz-6.1.0-37-amd64

and

/dev/sda1                       455M  120M  310M  28% /boot

Do you think will be enough? Should I remove the 6.1.0-36 kernel also?

Last edited by samarul (2025-08-12 06:55:24)

ralph.ronnquist

Administrator

From: Battery Point, Tasmania, AUS

Registered: 2016-11-30

Posts: 1,462  

Re: Upgrading to Excalibur

I wouldn't worry about that until it fills up; then removing old kernels is the first step. Though generally it may also be a good idea to keep a "live installer" USB stick on the shelf.

samarul

Member

Registered: 2023-06-15

Posts: 12  

Re: Upgrading to Excalibur

Thank you! I think I should start the upgrade now. But first a backup

samarul

Member

Registered: 2023-06-15

Posts: 12  

Re: Upgrading to Excalibur

Everything went so smooth! I think that only OpenBSD has the same easy upgrade process. Is my second release upgrade and I am not for a moment regretting the switch to Devuan some 3 years ago. It is the Linux distro I was waiting from 1999 (when I first started using Linux).

Geoff 42

Member

Registered: 2016-12-15

Posts: 464  

Re: Upgrading to Excalibur

My /boot is on a physical partition and is only 237 MB.
Most of my stuff is on LVM partitions. I could easily make a new 1 GB boot partition on LVM, but can Devuan easily boot off an LVM partition?

samarul

Member

Registered: 2023-06-15

Posts: 12  

Re: Upgrading to Excalibur

I think you would do fine with the 237 partition. Moving to LVM is tricky.

samarul

Member

Registered: 2023-06-15

Posts: 12  

Re: Upgrading to Excalibur

And when I thought that everything went smooth I encountered something very strange on 2 machines (one is host and another is guest of VirtualBox). On both after the upgrade lxdm just hangs. I can login using slim, but I am using cwm and all my starting stuff was in .xsession. I looked in the logs and I can't seem to find anything. Any idea?

Geoff 42

Member

Registered: 2016-12-15

Posts: 464  

Re: Upgrading to Excalibur

On both after the upgrade lxdm just hangs.

Ah! Apart from my query about /boot, I also use lxdm to start lxqt, so I suspect that I may not be in too much of a rush to upgrade to Excalibur.

Geoff

samarul

Member

Registered: 2023-06-15

Posts: 12  

Re: Upgrading to Excalibur

Yes. I think that you should wait a little. Is the third day I try to restore the login part.