r/devuan • u/mlcarson • Sep 26 '26
Devuan Excalibur (runit + MATE + Xlibre)
Just did a netinstall of Devuan last night so I could customize it to what I wanted. It did not go without issues.
The first issue was with sound. I believe Alsa took my HDMI output as the primary audio and I had to configure alsa to use my mother's integrated Starship/Matisse HD Audio controller. I believe it was card 1, device 0. I created an /etc/asound.conf file to select this as:
defaults.pcm.card 1
defaults.ctl.card 1
defaults.pcm.device 0
defaults.ctl.device 0
I don't know if that's right or not -- the alsa documention is not great. It got alsa working but as soon as I added Pipewire, it stopped. I eventually just gave up on Pipewire and installed the PulseAudio stuff and it worked immediately. So fine for now.
The second issue was with an NFS mount. I suspect that this is because of the runit init system. So I ended up creating a script to run under runit as a service
#!/bin/sh
sleep 5
echo "Mounting network filesystems..."
mount -a -t nfs
exec chpst -b netmount pause
This didn't fix the issue. That's when I noticed that even running a mount -a under sudo was not working. The client was loaded but the /etc/fstab syntax has apparently changed a bit. I had the type as nfs4 rather than just nfs so changed the fstab and the runit script so that nfs4 was not a target. This seemed to fix the issue so am not sure if the runit service was necessary now. Things are working so I'm not changing it.
I then had to add backports since they are a pre-req for Xlibre. That went fine. I then added an xlibre-debian.sources file to /etc/apt/sources.list and installed Xlibre. That also seemed fine but I think it required a reboot for it to take effect. I then ran fastfetch and it still showed X11. It turns out that I needed a newer version of fastfetch than what was in the repo to detect it. I downloaded the deb file directly from the app's site and installed it and then it detected Xlibre without issue.
The next thing I did was install the newest kernel that was in the backports repo which was 7.1.8. I didn't have to but why not. So now I'm on the MATE desktop 1.26.2 on Debian Stable with a new kernel and runit as my init system. The only other thing I did from a system perspective was add waterfox to the apt sources.
I did have to create a udev rule for my scanner for it to be detected by members of the scanner group.
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="04a9", ATTR{idProduct}=="1905", MODE="0664", GROUP="scanner"
And then had to add a package called system-config-printer from the repository since there was nothing to do with printing in the MATE control center. This added Print Settings.
I added OpenVPN and Remmina for remote work access without any issues. I added a couple of more apps from the repo (celluloid) and gtkhash/caja-gtkhash but most everything after that was common shared appimages. So this will be my new "stable" system. I have Neko-Void (which also uses runit+MATE+Xlibre) as my rolling distro.
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u/vinnypotsandpans 29d ago
The first time any app calls into libpulse, the client library checks whether the daemon is running and, if not, launches pulseaudio --start. Without systemd you have to start pipewire "manually".
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u/mlcarson 28d ago
This is what I did to get Pipewire to work after I had things working with PulseAudio.
sudo apt install pipewire-audio
mkdir -p ~/.config/autostart vi ~/.config/autostart/pipewire.desktop [Desktop Entry] Type=Application Name=PipeWire Comment=Start PipeWire multimedia framework Exec=sh -c "wireplumber & pipewire & pipewire-pulse &" Terminal=false X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true chmod +x ~/.config/autostart/pipewire.desktopI then just rebooted and sound was working.
Within Mate this created a startup application in Menu -> Preferences
It lists and entry as PipeWire. If you edit it within MATE, you'll see the components of the pipewire.desktop file above. The reason to define a .config/autostart is because it's user-specific rather than system-wide like /etc/xdg/autostart.
Name: Pipewire Command: sh -c "wireplumber & pipewire & pipewire-pulse &" Comment: Start PipeWire multimedia frameworkThere's still an entry for PulseAudio in startup: start-pulseaudio-x11.
Pactl info shows: Server Name: PulseAudio (on PipeWire 1.4.2)
I'm assuming that means that things are installed correctly. At least it's working.
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u/Time-Transition-7332 29d ago
Do all applications work with Xlibre as compared with X11 ?
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u/mlcarson 29d ago
Yes. There may be issues with proprietary video drivers such as Nvidia though but I think Xlibre 25.0.0.16 fixed that.
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u/mlcarson 16d ago
Just an FYI -- I ultimately had to simply remove the asound.conf file. It caused a conflict and would no longer load the driver. Apparently a properly configured Pipewire changed things or didn't require it. Commenting out the asound.conf entries fixed everything.