The excalibur repository has been available for use quite a long time,
and being a Devuan repository means that it's a client-side merge of
Devuan specific packages (forking away systemd) over the Debian trixie
packages. I.e. it's the repository meta files that are particular for
excalibur while the packages themselves are obtained by the client
(i.e. your machine) from either the Devuan pool (for the Devuan
specific packages) or the underlying Debian trixie pool (for the
majority of packages).

The testing/stable/etc linking is about to change so that stable links
to excalibur similar to how Debian stable now links to trixie. Afair
this may happen next week. So at this time anyone using "testing" or
"stable" as repository names (don't do that) may experience confusion.

The ISOs for installing from excalibur include a "traditional"
netinstall and a couple of live installers. These will probably be
renewed next week or so as well.

Ralph.

On Tue, Aug 12, 2025 at 11:53:58AM +1000, nick wrote:
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> Hi team,
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> I am running Daedalus on a number of PCs and laptops (for those who remember the problems I was having with Cinnamon desktop and with the real time clock, I would like to note that everything was significantly improved by installing a HWE kernel and a few smaller tweaks like enabling HiDPI support).
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> I am about to set up a server and this is often a bit of an ordeal since the cheaper provider I've been using doesn't let you BYO an image, so you have to start with Debian and then upgrade it to Devuan via the package manager. There are usually multiple hiccups, such as messages ending in "... is not going to be installed" which require tedious Web searches and experimentation to solve, but I digress...
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> Anyway, would now be a good time to experiment with Excalibur? I did try Excalibur when I first came to Devuan and my experience was not good, it didn't seem to have a proper installer or at least not one that worked, although perhaps I did it wrong. After reverting to Daedalus all went relatively smoothly, at least the install process did.
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> Now that Debian 13 (Trixie) has been released, does anyone know what is the plan for Excalibur? If it has been regularly updated with the Debian testing packages, then it should be almost ready for release, right? Or is there an extensive testing phase that would only start once the base (Trixie) has stabilised?
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> If it's going to be a long time to a new Devuan release then I might just stick with Daedalus for the time being. But if it's nearly ready then perhaps I will build my server with Excalibur (Devuan testing) in the expectation that I can soon upgrade to the release version through the package manager.
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> What does everyone think? And is there an official blog or mailing list where I should be checking for the authoritative information?
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> Kind regards, Nick
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