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Fierelier

Member

Registered: 2023-01-24

Posts: 11  

Devuan Excalibur on i386 - We need an official kernel!

I managed to create an i386 ISO of Devuan Excalibur, by using Devuan Daedalus' kernel. It is crazy how many packages are still available for i386, even Firefox, and other graphical packages. Seems like Debian Trixie is somewhat arbitrarily not building the kernel for i386...

It would be amazing if Devuan were to provide an official i386 kernel for Excalibur, because a lot of stuff still works.

If you want to recreate this, use debootstrap and bootstrap experimental (or excalibur, once it is out). Edit the /etc/sources.apt file like this:

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur main
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus main
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-security main

Do apt update, then you're able to install linux-image-686 or linux-image-686-pae. You probably want to add deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-security main on the second line, once it is out. Similar steps would probably work for Debian, too.

The only stable (non-excalibur) packages it installed for me, seem to be related to gnome's network manager applet, and the kernel itself of course. If you want to see which stable packages you ended up with, you can use: apt list --installed | grep "/stable"

If you want to download this, you can find the ISO here.

Last edited by Fierelier (2025-03-20 09:44:37)

hacksenwerk

Member

From: Europe

Registered: 2022-02-10

Posts: 24  

Re: Devuan Excalibur on i386 - We need an official kernel!

Nice work!

But I think it will be useless a year after the Debian 13 release, because there will be no security and compatibility updates anymore.
Sure there could be community updates, but that's not for sure and not a reliable source, because you don't know how long someone is willing to offer non-paid support.

Debians politics indicates only one thing imo: it's a sinking ship, supported only by yeasayers and (traumatized) people, who are not accepting the reality of all the bad things that happen to the whole project since many years.

A genuine Devuan kernel would be nice, I agree.
It would make Devuan more independent from Debian and their dumb decisions like the drop of 32-bit kernels.

For myself I use Linux-libre since years.
It's the upstream kernel but all unfree code and all BLOBs are removed.
Works perfectly fine ever since.
I use the LTS version, so you don't get tons of updates all the time.

There is an offical .deb-Repository, with support for a lot of CPU architectures, including 32-bit x86:
https://www.fsfla.org/ikiwiki/selibre/l … sh.en.html

Fierelier

Member

Registered: 2023-01-24

Posts: 11  

Re: Devuan Excalibur on i386 - We need an official kernel!

I haven't found official LTS, or other i386-specific support information about Debian Trixie yet, where do you get your information?

And thank you for the kernel pointer! I'll add that one for now, instead of hacking together daedalus/excalibur :>

hacksenwerk

Member

From: Europe

Registered: 2022-02-10

Posts: 24  

Re: Devuan Excalibur on i386 - We need an official kernel!

Official End of life (EOL) for i386 will be 2026-06-11.

The LTS team (they are not debian officials, but volunteers) will probably give LTS till 2028-06-30.
https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/

But you could pay Freexian to get 10 years of LTS: https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended
EOL for 32-bit kernel would the be 2033-06-30.
Maybe that's an option for Devuan, depending on their pricing, we could run a donation campaign.

Fierelier

Member

Registered: 2023-01-24

Posts: 11  

Re: Devuan Excalibur on i386 - We need an official kernel!

I uploaded an ISO of this project: https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=55001