Installing Devuan 6 (Excalibur)
Installing Devuan 6 (Excalibur) on my Thinkpad T14s Gen 4
So I have been running Devuan 6 (Excalibur) in a VM for a while now, at the time the Excalibur iso’s were not working properly so I installed Devuan 5 and upgraded to Devuan 6 Excalibur. This way I was able to test the up and coming released version of Devuan.
A few days ago I checked the Devuan site and spotted recent testing iso’s of Excalibur so I thought hey no time like the present try them outand als otry them out on hardware as I’m getting excited about this release so I couldn’t wait.
I decided to install Excalibur on my Thinkpad T14s which is about a year old now. I purchased it to not replace but maybe retire my Thinkpad X250 as my daily driver with a new faster laptop. The X250 was released in 2015 so the T14s is alot faster and battery life very much improved. The X250 is running Devuan 5 Daedalus and has truly been an amazing daily driver and still has allot of life left in it that’s for sure.
The Thinkpad T14s has been running a few different distributions but now I thought it’s time to install Devuan 6 Excalibur even though it is still in testing.
The T14s specs at a glance are:
- Raptorlake 13 Gen i5 12 core
- 16GB Ram
- Intel Iris Graphics
- M.2 1TB Drive.
I downloaded the Live Desktop iso which defaults to Xfce which is perfect as it is my DE of choice and proceeded to write it to a usb. Plugged it in booted it into a live session with out any issues.
Everything seem to be detected and work, so I connected to the net and proceeded with the install. I ran through the install process and it was done, very quick to install and no errors. I rebooted he system and was presented with a new login manager. The previous versions of Devuan used the Slim login manager, but this has been replaced with LightDM, which was a nice change.
As I said earlier all my hardware seem to be working, well that is not entirely correct. I discovered that my Soundcard was not detected, it was just showing as ‘Dummy Device’ in the sound control application. I did a bit of investigation and found that I needed to install the firmware package ‘firmware-sof-signed’ (sudo apt -y install firmware-sof-signed) After rebooting everything was detected and I had sound.
Apart from the sound card issue everything else is working as expected.
Now Devuan 6 is still in testing so somethings may change but I’m prepared for those if they arise.
All in all Devuan 6 (Excalibur) is a very nice distribution and if you like stability, security, freedom and a great community I would give it a try, you may like it. Of course it comes with Xfce so why wouldn’t you want to try it out!
Can’t wait for the final release!
R.