Hi,

adding i386 architecture is recommended or mandatory for wine installations.

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

Personal experiences:
I had pointless trys using WINEARCH=win[32,64] and wine installtions without i386 architecture. You can do that, but expect pain.
Instead: May the wine warper script decide such things - as long as it works.

Does 'Installing cups by installing another distribution' count?
Anyway. Your choice.

Great advice, thanks a lot! Totally forgot about liquorix.

My shiny new computer does not suffer on windows, but the old one has a (more or less) big data partition formated with ntfs. For the fist time the transfer speed is in a reasonable dimension. I'm quite happy with that.

No news on the USB-stick front so far.

Thanks for the replies.

The stick is for a TV set-top-box.
4 GB file size is easy to hit. Sadly, ext[3,4] file systems are not recognised.
Tried exfat: File size is good, but the file system is not recognised either.

Found some information on Paragon's "ntfs3" driver, e.g. https://forum.manjaro.org/t/how-to-enable-ntfs3/86049/4

$ cat /boot/config-6.9.12-amd64 | grep -i ntfs3
# CONFIG_NTFS3_FS is not set

Means recompiling the kernel to enable it.

The desktop nice.
Last resort of Microsoft Windows.

Interesting command lines for rsync, indeed.
I'll stick to cat (or dd) a partition and resize2fs the file system to the target partition's size.

What???
You want
EITHER grow a file system to the full partition's size (see #2)
OR recover "something" from the drive.

cp simply over-writes. I would start looking for a back-up.
ddrescue is useful, when dd aborts with an error, e.g. when the drive is physically damaged.
testdisk (as far as I remember) is looking for known file headers (like png/jpg images, zip/gz archives, etc) on the raw disk and trys to recover them.

Even if you would provide all information to the accident in detail, I doubt someone could help. Sorry.

Adding the daedalus-backports repository would be a convenient way to have a quite current kernel (6.9).

cat /etc/apt/sources.list | grep backports
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

apt install -t daedalus-backports linux-image-amd64

Beside the kernel, firmware can be a major problem especially on new notebooks. There are no backports releases by now, e.g. https://pkginfo.devuan.org/cgi-bin/poli … *&x=submit . I would go for the newest packages for all build-in components.

I don't know synaptic, but can parse the list to apt. If you hate terminals, just ignore this.

"listapt.txt" contains _all_ debian packages in the installed repositories (--installed or --manual-installed would do a selection like below).

You want to re-install the ones marked with "[installed]", not "[installed,automatic]". Have a good look at "[installed,local]", which were either downloaded or not in the current repositories.

cat listapt.txt | grep '\[installed,local\]'

Let's prepare the installation:
There will be errors; work on cleaned.list.txt, until apt succeeds. Then omit "-s" in the apt command.

cat listapt.txt | grep '\[installed\]' | awk -F/ '{print $1}' >cleaned.list.txt
apt install -s  $(cat cleaned.list.txt | awk '{printf"%s ", $0}') 

Too many errors? Maybe just the tasks for the big picture?

apt install  $(cat cleaned.list.txt | grep ^task | awk '{printf"%s ", $0}')

Hope this helps, and yes I'm about to do that myself.

Today I looked at some back-up copies in /root/_backup/usr/local/bin/  ... and found symliks "corrected" too.
That's not funny!

apt purge symlinks

@fsmithred:  Thanks for debsums!

@SpongeBOB:  My personal preference is to upgrade - beside the good advices above.