No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

Henfished · 2025-06-12 18:31:30

I have just bought a Clevo V560KU. These machines are sold under many different names, are highly configurable and can usually be sold without any WIndows. Be that as it may it uses a rather recent AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370.

I am having trouble getting devuan installed: it looks as if I will be able to succeed with
devuan_daedalus_5.0.0_i386_desktop-live.iso, but I do not want to overwrite the existing partitions on the internal SSD
in case there are any manuals or other useful stuff there until I have taken a copy.

To get devuan_daedalus_5.0.0_i386_desktop-live to work, I had to get into the BIOS (hold down F2) and disable secure boot
and then use F7 to set the right boot device. However, the keyboard did not work on the menus. Eventually I tried auto-install
which didn't use the keyboard. The system clearly fetched a driver or perhaps some firmware, because although it failed, it then dumped me into the expert install menu, but now with a working keyboard. So there is something to be fixed there.

When I got as far as repartitioning the disk, I aborted since I wanted a backup first. Perhaps I could have backed up from there,
but instead I looked for a dedicated live devuan, especially since I already had a copy on an USB stick.

That devuan-live didn't work at all: it just dumped me into a grub prompt. So I looked for a refracta live image and tried
refracta_13_nox_amd64-20250425_1329.iso .
This also failed in the same way: it just produces a grub> prompt . It is a long time since I played the the grub command line
but could find nothing useful, although I was able to find and cat the grub.cfg file which was not enlightening.

greenjeans · 2025-06-12 20:25:14

The "nox" in that Refracta iso stands for "NO X", so all you could get would be a tty as far as I know.

Not sure why you're trying a 32 bit iso on an ultra-modern machine with a really powerful CPU???

Here's a link to a livecd I made from vanilla Devuan Daedalus that uses the Mate desktop. It uses Refracta Installer instead of the slooooow way, lol, so about a 10 minute install. Try that on a liveUSB, perhaps you'll have better luck. FYI it is 64 bit.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/vuu-do … Mate-mini/

If you do install, run Gparted first (if needed) and check the boxes for "don't run the partitioner" at a couple places, then carefully choose which partition you want to use.

FYI: Don't burn the iso to a stick using Ventoy, Devuan doesn't work properly, use something else. Mintstick is in the repo and it works fine.

Last edited by greenjeans (2025-06-12 20:26:58)

Henfished · 2025-06-12 21:24:06

I didn't realise that refracta_13_nox_amd64-20250425_1329.iso was 32 bit. I just saw amd64 as part of the name and assumed that it was 64 bit. Are you sure?

I followed your link and saw "This is not uefi-enabled"? So isn't that going to fail at the first hurdle? I don't think the BIOS on this machine will not boot from MBR?

I had never heard of ventoy. Why would I use anything but dd ?

Henfished · 2025-06-12 21:48:52

Another update. I have since tried devuan_excalibur_6.0-20241017_amd64_netinstall.iso.
No joy.

All these iso's fail to mount with errors like
Failed to mount .. LABEL=DEVUAN.. on /cdrom
and indeed on the refractars which dump to grub, I have now explored further and the only file (system) system is
/boot/grub/grub.cfg

and that grub.cfg is trying to load from /isolinux or from /boot/isolinux/initrd.gz and those files or filesystems do not exist.

I said earlier that the keyboard did not work (past the initial dialogue) on devuan_excalibur_6.0-20241017_amd64_netinstall.iso and
devuan_daedalus_5.0.0_amd64_desktop-live.iso, but that the automatic option seemed to download
drivers or whatever to re-enable the keyboard. I can't get that to work again. So a full stop.

It may be that I have only rechecked on excalibur and need to switch back to daedalus.

But right now it looks as if I can't get devuan on this machine in any straight forward way. Perhaps I can take the ssd out and prepare it in another machine, but as of yet I can't open the case (lack of usual instructions), and it is under warranty so I need to be very careful.

Perhaps I will have to give up on devuan for now, at least. I hate to let systemd on, but I guess that I have to try to get debian to install. I only have a few days to return the machine if I can't get linux running, although that seems very unlikely.
This clevo is sold with linux installed on some dedicated linux shops, so it can't be that hard.

Henfished · 2025-06-12 21:52:09

I should have added that all the iso's work on my older Clevo, but that is using MBR rather than UEFI.

greenjeans · 2025-06-12 22:11:05

I followed your link and saw "This is not uefi-enabled"? So isn't that going to fail at the first hurdle? I don't think the BIOS on this machine will not boot from MBR?

I'm going by your first post in which you stated that you were able to go into BIOS and disable UEFI.

Regardless of efi, an MBR iso should still boot up as a livecd, and can be installed on an efi system by simply not installing grub when you install from the live system. You'll still need to update grub on whatever partition controls it.

It may be that you need additional firmware over and above what is provided in standard Devuan, that's always a possibility.

Please keep in mind that I am not a dev, just a user. So this is my best guesses. RRQ is probably who you need.

So at the link I sent you, there are also my own projects, Openbox and Mate, and those iso's contain a LOT of firmware, additional xorg packages, microcode and more, to help insure that they boot and work out of the box. Possibly one might help you, not trying to toot my own horn here, it's just that Devuan in fact is a "parent" distro from the get-go, and so there is a lot of software that it does not include by default that may be required for your machine. Devuan rightly assumes that anyone using them for a base will include such packages in their own distros and projects.

Why use anything but dd? I don't know, if you're confident with it then go for it, I base my advice on the idea that some folks may not be comfortable with such things, so I try to offer an easy to use GUI solution.

yurimodin · 2025-06-13 00:04:35

TBH that newer AI cpu might need something super bleeding edge like Artix

I was also getting that failure to mount /cdrom error as well and IIRC I dug through some mirrors and found one with a different snapshot date and it worked.

greenjeans · 2025-06-13 00:20:05

^^ yep, might be better to try excalibur and the newer kernel.

ralph.ronnquist · 2025-06-13 01:03:00

You might want to try the newest devuan_excalibur_6.0-20250605_amd64_netinstall.iso which does include very recent firmware that possibly could help with the keyboard issue. That ISO is further improved to support boot via a Ventoy stick boot loading, which I'm guessing will suit you.

Henfished · 2025-06-13 09:24:42

Thanks for all the replies.

1) I tried the vuu-do Devuan-Mate-Mini-20250206_1826.iso anyway. It worked on my old MBR clevo, but
was not even visible in the new UEFI laptop BIOS. In my first post, I did not say that I had disabled UEFI, but the
UEFI 'Secure boot' setting.

2) I will try

devuan_excalibur_6.0-20250605_amd64_netinstall.iso

when I can find it :-) It isn't on the mirror that I was using.

3) I need to follow up on the other suggestions. Thanks.

ralph.ronnquist · 2025-06-13 10:23:41

That doesn't sound like an active mirror but I guess you looked carefully in devuan_excalibur/installer-iso/.
The mirrors are otherwise listed at https://www.devuan.org/get-devuan and if you find an inactive one you could "report" that eg as a "devuan-www" bug at https:///bugs.devuan.org.

rolfie · 2025-06-13 10:58:26

I would assume that such a brandnew computer has an UEFI only bios. No more CSM mode supported. So the legacy strategies to boot a stick do no more work.

Henfished · 2025-06-13 11:38:28

I downloaded devuan_excalibur_6.0-20250605_amd64_netinstall.iso from another mirror and success - well nearly: I could not use f2fs for my root partition. It seems that the partitioner could not manage f2fs.

I have had the same problem before with daedalus, and I thought that I bug reported that back then. I managed to work arround that, but don't remember how I did it: probably by taking a copy of / , reformating with f2fs and then copying back. It does seem odd that in these days of ssd that a format especially designed for that hardware is
not supported by default.

But basically success. So thanks to everyone. Of course it is too early to know what other problems I may hit after the basic installation.

Last edited by Henfished (2025-06-13 11:40:18)

Andre4freedom · 2025-06-13 16:05:17

I'm not sure if that post belongs here..... feel free to correct me.
I installed your latest devuan_excalibur_6.0-20250605_amd64_netinstall.iso
What a pleasure. Everything works out of the box, no tinkering.

But, still, the same old problem has made it to excalibur:
I chose OpenRC as the init system, and anacron still prevents to shutdown orderly.
The problem was there already; Devuan 3, 4, 5....
I tested a fresh install with the InitSysV and that works well, no anacron problem.
Where should I report that problem?
(cron never posed a problem, only anacron does)

Last edited by Andre4freedom (2025-06-14 08:01:14)

Andre4freedom · 2025-06-14 17:30:02

I started a new thread for that bug:

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=7248

Devarch · 2025-06-16 11:18:28

I have the same issue with AMD Ryzen 9 HX 3700 and AMD Radeon 890M. Additionally, neither Excalibur nor Daedalus netinstall .iso images have WiFi support; they all require iwlwifi-ty* on an external USB drive. However, even when I provide it, Devuan is unable to find and use the driver.

I've tried almost everything. The workaround that worked for me:

1. Grab a Debian Bookworm netinstall .ISO (I did not find a proper way to replace systemd with something else in Debian Trixie). Bonus: It has a beautiful GUI installer and does not require WiFi drivers.
2. Replace systemd with something else as described here: https://lecorbeausvault.wordpress.com/2 … nit-runit/ (there is a new version of the guide, but the old one still works).
3. Then follow instructions from https://www.devuan.org/os/documentation … o-daedalus except the part about init.
4. Now change your source.list to point to Excalibur and upgrade again (do not forget to apply usr merge).
5. Finally, boot into the new OS, install a DE, AMD, and Vulkan drivers.

There are still some issues:
- The display flickers when an app is in fullscreen mode (F11). To fix this, I disabled vsync in KDE display settings.
- After applying this fix, apps on Wine still flicker in full-screen mode (F11).
- MPV video flickering with gpu-api=vulkan. To fix this, use gpu-api=opengl. Strange, but there is no flickering on an external display.
- The AMD ROCM driver does not work with this card. There are no hardware limitations to using ROCm; it's just a decision by AMD not to make users' lives easier.
- amd RyzenAdj partly works. It doesn't display any info but applies changes. However, these can be easily overwritten by something else. No fix I've found (except to cron it to every 30 seconds).
- Anacron is broken and prevents shutdown. Fix: apt purge anacron."

fsmithred · 2025-06-16 12:25:07

I have the same issue with AMD Ryzen 9 HX 3700 and AMD Radeon 890M. Additionally, neither Excalibur nor Daedalus netinstall .iso images have WiFi support; they all require iwlwifi-ty* on an external USB drive. However, even when I provide it, Devuan is unable to find and use the driver.

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.

Devarch · 2025-06-16 12:54:56

Impossible. The installer does not detect network interfaces. I've only wireless. Guess how does it know which driver to request

Last edited by Devarch (2025-06-16 12:55:17)

fsmithred · 2025-06-16 13:02:12

The installer looks at your hardware and when it sees which intel wireless chip you have, it will install the firmware-iwlwifi package that it pulls from the /firmware directory inside the iso.

I want to know if you stopped the installation at the point where it asks for the driver or if you continued without it and it failed at some later point.

Normally you can ignore that request for the driver and you will be able to set up the network during the install.

Devarch · 2025-06-16 13:15:53

I was not able to set up network interfaces. So, I've stopped here. I don't know if it's possible to install from net install without internet.(?)

rolfie · 2025-06-16 13:49:20

I don't know if it's possible to install from net install without internet?

Sure it is. But you should specify the network and its details as if it was fully working.
BTW: most of the network drivers are part of the kernel.

fsmithred · 2025-06-16 13:51:27

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.

fsmithred · 2025-06-16 19:51:47

I got the screenshot I wanted by installing on a laptop that has eth0 that does not work and wlan0 that does work.
https://get.refracta.org/files/misc/pro … mware.jpeg

This was an expert install of devuan_excalibur_6.0-20250605_amd64_netinstall.iso. I'm not sure if expert is necessary to get this firmware question.

I answered "no" to providing the firmware on external media and proceeded.
When it got to network detection and configuration, it only saw eth0. Since eth0 is broken, dhcp failed. I set it up manually and gave it a good local address.

When it came to setting up the package manager, I had to proceed without a mirror. While it was installing the base system, I switched to vt2 and saw that it was installing firmware-iwlwifi.

After the sofware install but before it installed grub bootloader, I opened a shell and tried to set up the wireless.
wlan0 did not show up with 'ip a'. I chrooted the installed system (in /target) and tried configuring wlan0 in /etc/network/interfaces. That didn't work. wpasupplicant was not installed. rfkill was not installed, so I couldn't see if the wireless card got switched off. That's when I gave up.

In past releases, the network setup saw the wireless hardware and let me choose whether to set up eth0 or wlan0. That didn't happen here. I'll pass this info on to the iso builder.

Reported here:
https://bugs.devuan.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=894

Devarch · 2025-06-16 22:08:22

fsmithred, unfortunately I could not see your post before.

I've made install with devuan_excalibur_6.0-20250605_amd64_netinstall.iso to AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, AMD Radeon 890M. I've flashed it to usb flash drive (no ventoy, rufus etc).

Expert install.
First error: The missing firmware files are : iwlwifi-ty********

Second error: No network interfaces detected

Then "The system can be set up to symlink /bin and /sbin to /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, respectively. ....If unsure, the safe choice is "No".
However, the default choice was Yes.
So,Yes.

Third error: Bad archive mirror #of cause, there is no internet
Then "standard_system_utilities" - selected
"Update NVRAM variables to automatically boot into Devuan?" - Yes

Forth error: wpa_passphrase not found #got it from https://packages.debian.org/trixie/wpasupplicant unfortunately there is no such site for Devuan. Probably, wpasupplicant is stored somewhere in devuan_excalibur_6.0-20250605_amd64_netinstall.iso...
Then mounted Devuan flash drive to /media/cdroom to satisfy dependencies.
The same story with dhclient
Then tasksel, laptop....
Finally, apt install DE_of_choice (KDE) and reboot

I was able to log in successfully. To my surprise AMD graphics drivers and vulkan were installed.

BUT... shit happens. Fifth error: /EFI/debian is overridden. It was "debian" because devuan1 has been installed through migration. Why it's called "debian" again ?

Conclusion. Too complicated. May be it'll be simpler to install Devuan through Vmware on physical partitions and then boot normally?

Last edited by Devarch (2025-06-16 22:09:43)

Devarch · 2025-06-16 23:06:19

Sure it is. But you should specify the network and its details as if it was fully working.

Not possible. There are no network interfaces, then no wpassupplicant no nmtui even /etc/apt/sources.list points to cdrom

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#1 2025-06-12 18:31:30

No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#2 2025-06-12 20:25:14

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#3 2025-06-12 21:24:06

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#4 2025-06-12 21:48:52

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#5 2025-06-12 21:52:09

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#6 2025-06-12 22:11:05

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#7 2025-06-13 00:04:35

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#8 2025-06-13 00:20:05

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#9 2025-06-13 01:03:00

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#10 2025-06-13 09:24:42

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#11 2025-06-13 10:23:41

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#12 2025-06-13 10:58:26

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#13 2025-06-13 11:38:28

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#14 2025-06-13 16:05:17

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#15 2025-06-14 17:30:02

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#16 2025-06-16 11:18:28

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#17 2025-06-16 12:25:07

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#18 2025-06-16 12:54:56

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#19 2025-06-16 13:02:12

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#20 2025-06-16 13:15:53

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#21 2025-06-16 13:49:20

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#22 2025-06-16 13:51:27

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#23 2025-06-16 19:51:47

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#24 2025-06-16 22:08:22

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

#25 2025-06-16 23:06:19

Re: No live devuan or refracta will boot on a new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX370

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