You may want to investigate the stage3/stage4 tarballs used in Gentoo/Funtoo as these offer a good deal of the functionality you describe.

HTH!

I used Mate/LightDM   Having said that, Funtoo is based on Gentoo and has OpenRC as init system, which is highly parallelized. IMO a modern system based on NVMe M.2 or PCIe SSD's with OpenRC would be able to cut cold-start boot times to below 3-5 seconds. Currently, manufacturers claim to have approached the theoretical band-width of PCIe (4Gb/s) in the latest incarnations of PCIe based SSD's (including NVMe) at 3.7 Gb/s read/write. Personally, I foresee that SATA will follow the likes of IDE, ISA and APG within the next 5 years as PCIe and whatever follows it will render the "old" SATA bus obsolete.

But then, what do I know

A related issue I ran into, although for Ascii: over the weekend, maybe longer, my usual nl.deb.devuan.org repo failed due to missing release files. Changing to deb.devuan.org failed too, as it points to the same local mirror. Changing to pkgmaster.devuan.org fixed the problem. Does that warrant a bug report?

Name me any OS that performs this from a cold start.

I had, for a time, a moderately spec'd desktop that could do a cold start in under 10 seconds, using an SSD, running Funtoo. This was with a Grub time-out period, so effectively it could boot in under 5 seconds. I'm still on the same hardware, but as I had to change OS due to Funtoo's inability to perform an intelligent update/upgrade w/o breaking virtually anything, switching to Devuan, it takes a little longer to boot, but still below 30 sec.

When I do that (installed from a .deb package) it tells me it detected yt-dl was installed via a package manager and I should use that to install a new version, then quits. It does not update the package!

@golinux: No offense, but I'm not cool with your 'compile it yourself' advise every time someone asks for the inclusion of a new or updated package. Yes, I could compile stuff myself, but then I'd be installing s/w outside of the apt tool chain, so what's the use of that? Taking that a step further, if I install tools/apps outside of the package management tools provided by Debian/Devuan, what's the purpose of a package manager? Then I could just switch back to Funtoo, which is a source-based distro anyway

Many thanks guys, I had given up on this. ATM I'm having a holiday so it's not really urgent.

@pcalvert: this is exactly what I'm doing, installing a Devuan base system (no GUI!) from an install CD (I only use CD1 from the set) then edit sources.list to remove the cdrom entry and enable the local mirror. I know I can provide a path during the install phase, but as my co-worker(s) has/have little to no Linux experience, I'd like to keep it simple for him/them in the install guide I wrote. Which also teaches him/them a bit about Linux

As for the ttl-workaround: I update from the official Devuan mirror on my desktop, then copy the entire tree (rsync is an asset here!) to a USB harddrive. This harddrive is then used to transfer the tree onto the local offline mirror, again using rsync. So that's not a problem. The issue is with the clients on the offline network that need installing. Now the ttl of the mirror is set so low I essentially have to sync the mirror each time I go there. (it's a part-time section of my job, just 2 days/week and not consecutive)  Our IT guys have promised me I can get online access as soon as the fibre connection works, but that's delayed since at least Sept. last year

@msi: he'd already stated he's on Ascii, as per the title of the thread

@strierlitz: post your /etc/apt/sources.list, it should include the contrib and non-free repo's. If they don't, add these (synaptic has the option to do it for you, but as you're clearly capable of comfortable on the cli, a text editor will do too ) then update the package list: apt-get update.

HTH!

NFS is a server-client system, so just nfs-common on its own doesn't work at all, as you've experienced. What you need is to install nfs-server on the appropriate machine and then configure both server and client to exchange data. For the server, you 'export' the directory you want to share, while on the client, a line must be added to fstab so the kernel knows where to find it. See the NFS man-pages for more detailed info.

Well, first things first: if you have any data on that machine worth keeping, copy it over to a safe storage device. When done, it allows you to start afresh.

Rather then writing a detailed guide, I'll refer you to the install guide from Funtoo. I've run Funtoo in the (recent) past and found their install guide very helpful indeed. The part you need is here: click! Funtoo uses the SysrescueCD tools to give you a working live system. It's perfectly OK to use it preparing your hard-drive. Make sure you reboot the machine for changes to the partition table to take effect.

Once done setting up the disk as you've chosen, re-run the installer from the live-disk (or USB drive in your case) to see if it detects the partitions you've made.

HTH!

OK then, Pluma it'll be.

Given it's gonna be a full translation, I might be a while. Remind me 3 months in (that is, after I received the templates, etc)

OK, if it's that simple I'll have a look into the Dutch language pack then. Can't make any promises as there's a lot on my plate already. Can these files be opened by LibreOffice and more importantly, edited and saved in the correct format?

If Dutch works, I may try my hand at German too. But as a non-native speaker I'm not sure my options/solutions/translations would be best suited. For now, that's of no concern, first the Dutch language pack to solve before anything else!