Devuan Excalibur mate-mini + Xlibre!

greenjeans · 2025-09-01 23:18:50

Two new iso's uploaded in testing, the Devuan Excalibur mate-mini has been updated, and the same iso but featuring the Xlibre display system in place of xorg as well! This is VERY experimental software, Xlibre is brand new and the testing iso has been made with packages from the Xlibre repo on github made for Devuan. If you want to test and report on it, make sure any bug you find is related to Xlibre, best practice is to download both iso's for testing, if you have a problem in the Xlibre iso, make sure to check the standard iso before reporting an issue to see if you have the same problem.

The standard iso is still experimental as Devuan has not declared Excalibur to be stable yet. The Xlibre iso is just a convenient way to test on a liveUSB or in a virtual machine.

Again, NOT official Devuan or Vuu-do or Xlibre! Also please note that I have changed sources.list from deb.devuan.org due to issues with my ISP, I am using gnlug which works great here in the midwest US, but might be very slow for others, especially in other countries, those folks should try the standard Devuan address or find a local mirror.

It seems to be working fine for the most part, I do get an occasional artifact in the form of a small line that only blinks for a millisecond or two on my machine, it's mostly random but I can get it to happen fairly regularly in the Mate System Monitor by opening it and switching between tabs. It snapshotted just fine and running it as a liveUSB is working fine too, I have not done an install with it yet. Use at your own risk!

Username/Password
devuan = devuan
root = root

https://sourceforge.net/projects/vuu-do … te-mini-6/

fsmithred · 2025-09-02 17:57:33

I'm curious to see what glxgears tells you. Added xlibre to a refracta-excalibur (xfce) VM and tested in qemu and hardware against the same system with xorg.

In qemu...

xlibre: 18FPS
xorg: 800FPS

live-usb on hardware (Thinkpad T450s)...

xlibre: 60FPS
xorg: 60FPS

I don't know enough to make any intelligent comments about that. I do notice that xlibre is slow in qemu.

greenjeans · 2025-09-03 15:56:46

Dang, I wish I had thought to run glxgears on the base iso before I converted to Xlibre. I'll run some tests today on liveUSB's and one on the currently installed Xlibre version.

I don't know enough either to comment on what results I get, but I can at least test and throw up some data. I also think results may vary widely depending on hardware and what firmware is used. There was also an update to xlibre yesterday so this is a rapidly evolving project, so i'm keeping that version on that partition for a while. I'll do some testing today on it, then update it and test again.

ffp · 2025-09-03 17:52:17

Simply out of curiosity: do we really need xlibre in Devuan Excalibur?
X11 server has been forked a few months ago and I assume it's still included in Debian Trixie and should work well enough for the next 2 years.
It might not be relevant if you don't plan on switching to testing or am I wrong about this?

greenjeans · 2025-09-03 18:06:49

Some updates.
Ran glxgears in:
Devuan daedalus: 60 fps
Vuu-do ob-max (daedalus): 60 fps
Devuan excalibur-xlibre: 60 fps

Edit: Just tried the xlibre iso in a liveUSB session, same thing, 60 fps. I also installed VLC in that session and watched a video and it seems to work fine, couldn't detect any glitches or loss of quality.

All which match the refresh rate for my monitor, so no issue there with that simple test.

I'm still getting that little blink artifact, even after updating the two packages that were pushed yesterday, the server and common.

On boot sequence I get an error:
startpar services returned failure : X11-common failed
Which makes sense as X11-common was removed, though residual config remains as it does with a number of the X11 packages removed, have not tried a full delete of the residual config yet to see if that stops the error.

Off-topic: Still getting a 26 second delay during boot up in excalibur at:"waiting for dev to be fully populated"

Also still getting the alsa error during boot up: "GOTO alsa_restore_std has no matching label in /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/90-alsa_restore_std", and indeed there is no alsa_restore_std in that folder, maybe there should be one or the alsa rules file in there needs to be edited?

Last edited by greenjeans (2025-09-03 19:40:04)

greenjeans · 2025-09-03 18:12:42

@ffp: I haven't heard anyone say we needed it, some of us are just pitching in to help test it.

As i've said before, my main maxim for Linux is: you either make do, or you make new.

I'm just trying to help some folks that are trying to make new.

ffp · 2025-09-04 09:04:18

Hi greenjeans, this is in no way meant to question you or anything. I'm simply curious because I always thought the idea behind Debian and, by extension, Devuan, was to build the new version for 2 years, release it as stable and then most packages wouldn't even be updated unless a security issue is found within them so it just seemed a bit odd to port xlibre to a stable system that should still run fine with X11. And I doubt that within 3 months xlibre has had any serious changes happen to make it stand out compared to what we already have now. That said, I haven't really dug that deep into it to see how far in development it's been. Obviously for Forky or other future versions of Debian the situation would be different should Debian decide to drop Xorg support altogether.

greenjeans · 2025-09-04 10:49:51

Good questions ffp, I just don't have answers for you as i'm not a part of Devuan's Dev team. That being said I haven't heard anybody say it was in consideration for Devuan proper, there's just a lot of interest though in the community, if you take a peek at xlibre's IRC channel on libera you'll see a lot of members of this forum hanging out there.

I myself don't even have a good understanding of what it brings to the table, that's why i'm testing and trying to learn more about it, and trying to make it easier for other people like me to do some testing as well by squashing up these iso's. Not everybody wants to mess with their current installations by trying experimental software on them, but it's super easy to download an iso with xlibre already on there and burn it to a stick and run a live-session to run it through it's paces on their hardware.

rayburn · 2025-09-04 18:14:47

@greenjeans I agree with your last post regarding offering an iso with xlibre for interested folks like me who are keen to see X11 continue in some form. I downloaded your xlibre iso and tested it briefly, it runs well on an older laptop with the only flaw that I could see being that blink artifact that you have described.

It is very early in the development of xlibre and presumably minor bugs like that will get ironed out in due course.

Thanks for all your efforts.

greenjeans · 2025-09-05 15:05:15

Thanks rayburn! Also, that's good to know the blinking is happening on your machine too, that at least means it's not just my hardware.

greenjeans · Yesterday 21:10:32

3-18-2026 Updated version of the Xlibre Devuan-mate-mini-6 (excalibur).

Just uploaded an updated copy of this iso, as before it's identical to the standard version
with the exception of the use of Xlibre for display. This is new software and not official
Devuan packages (for now). And again this whole iso is not official Devuan. That being
said it's working nicely, the video artifacts from the last version months ago seem to be
all gone and I think it's using a little less ram too.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/vuu-do … -6-xlibre/

rations · Yesterday 23:53:52

Great job. I noticed on the github page, now it says for excalibur you have to enable backports. Do you know why? I have installed it with and without backports and works great. Just wondering why backports is needed?

Also I tested xlibre on old and new hardware with mate, xfce, openbox and jwm and they all work well. On new hardware with nvidia, the improvements are that good my young bloke stopped asking me to upgrade the graphics card.

Is there an excalibur, xlibre, vuudo version planned?

fsmithred · Today 00:30:23

@rations: Which github page are you looking at? This one suggests that you might need backports for daedalus, but I don't see excalibur-backports mentioned.

https://xlibre-deb.github.io/devuan/

You might need to install libdrm* packages from Devuan daedalus-backports repository.

I haven't tried xlibre on daedalus, so I don't know if it's needed or not.

viptux · Today 01:23:01

For awareness,

Active maintained Xlibre URL for Devuan (unofficial) is now: https://github.com/xlibre-debian/devuan

greenjeans · Today 01:41:07

Interesting...I did NOT have to enable backports the way I did it, I used fsmithred's link which is the same process I used back in September.
https://xlibre-deb.github.io/devuan/

@rations, yes, but it will be a while.

So some clarification is needed I think, Xlibre seems to be working fine from the older repo, what about this new repo requires backports to work?

viptux · Today 02:22:50

the URL noted above was the post-fork for debian/devuan by apebl
(no longer maintained since Sept 2025)

Debian / Devuan / Ubuntu APTs are now maintained by NexusSfan.
FYA, LeePen's seatd patches were also merged upstream for the solstice release.

@callmetango provided status of the project as stable release (25.1.3) approaches.
Please reference: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/wik … .1-Changes
.

Best Regards

*EDIT* : Backports for devuan stable is required for some updated video drivers (Mesa dependency) ie: AMDGPU

Last edited by viptux (Today 02:30:26)

greenjeans · Today 02:35:21

Thank you @viptux for clarification, okay then, we'll go from there and see what's what.

The officially official Devuan Forum!

#1 2025-09-01 23:18:50

Devuan Excalibur mate-mini + Xlibre!

#2 2025-09-02 17:57:33

Re: Devuan Excalibur mate-mini + Xlibre!

#3 2025-09-03 15:56:46

Re: Devuan Excalibur mate-mini + Xlibre!

#4 2025-09-03 17:52:17

Re: Devuan Excalibur mate-mini + Xlibre!

#5 2025-09-03 18:06:49

Re: Devuan Excalibur mate-mini + Xlibre!

#6 2025-09-03 18:12:42

Re: Devuan Excalibur mate-mini + Xlibre!

#7 2025-09-04 09:04:18

Re: Devuan Excalibur mate-mini + Xlibre!

#8 2025-09-04 10:49:51

Re: Devuan Excalibur mate-mini + Xlibre!

#9 2025-09-04 18:14:47

Re: Devuan Excalibur mate-mini + Xlibre!

#10 2025-09-05 15:05:15

Re: Devuan Excalibur mate-mini + Xlibre!

#11 Yesterday 21:10:32

Re: Devuan Excalibur mate-mini + Xlibre!

#12 Yesterday 23:53:52

Re: Devuan Excalibur mate-mini + Xlibre!

#13 Today 00:30:23

Re: Devuan Excalibur mate-mini + Xlibre!

#14 Today 01:23:01

Re: Devuan Excalibur mate-mini + Xlibre!

#15 Today 01:41:07

Re: Devuan Excalibur mate-mini + Xlibre!

#16 Today 02:22:50

Re: Devuan Excalibur mate-mini + Xlibre!

#17 Today 02:35:21

Re: Devuan Excalibur mate-mini + Xlibre!

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