@semil, whan I just now installed gpm and tried it on a console, it happily responded to tapping as clicking. It's missing out on other fancy stuff that I've set up on synclient for X11 but it handls single, double tripple taps well.

Have you verified that /etc/gpm.conf says device=/dev/input/mice (and type=exps2) ?

Note that each desktop environment, whether it is kde or xfce or lxqt, is a largish stack of packages that have been made to work together, and in some cases the different desktop environments have competing demands of packages. Basically as a concept, having multiple DE's installed is not like having a house with many rooms, but more like having a single-room house with several collections of furniture in it.

E.g. one fundamental competition with your DE collection is wether the display server is Xorg or Wayland (some require the one or the other, some kind of work with either) and there are numerous of conflicting demands stemming from that. And I believe slim if you've installed that requires Xorg whereas sddm might handle either Xorg or Wayland although might need configuration choice about which to use.

Afaik startx is a completely different program which is supposed to run an Xorg as display server, and then have the desired auto-started programs nominated in an .xinitrc (or something similar).

I think you would have an easier task if you go back and rather make a single choice than pile up multiple options without bothering about or knowing how they compete.

Well, you'd want the forked packages.

I still think your issue is that the USB host (xhci_hcd) driver fails to suspend, which the log says, and it willl need explicit unloading beforehand. I.e. it's not related to which Xorg packages you have.

Maybe worth a try to install pm-utils and trial it with the pm-suspend command?

Usually one would install task-xfce-desktop and be happy with that. It would bring in that s.c. "standard" xfce desktop environment with all its bells and whistles. Though it appears you want something else.

If you want to do it with tasksel I think you need to reconfigure rather than install.

EDIT: no I was wrong about tasksel; you just run it as root.

try with

SUSPEND_MODULES=xhci_hcd

in /etc/pm/config.d/something

EDIT: That of course will stop wake-up via USB keyboard...

This looks like "the broken xhci_hcd problem" from 2015 is back... at the time it was solved by unloading the module before sleep and loading it back on resume.

It appears that the documentation page you linked
https://www.devuan.org/os/documentation … all-devuan
skips a couple of dialoges:
1. between its 9 and 10 is a dialogue to select which disk to work with, and
2. between its 10 and 11 is a dialog that presents an overview of all disk layouts.

If the #11 dialog in your case includes sdb, you need to choose the "No" option to go back to the partitioner and undo any partitioning of sdb that you have chosen.

I would say that technically the story is that the partitioning software shows all avaiable drives of the system, and it's the person installing that decides and selects which drives to partition and how to use them for installation.

However, it's the software is the debian package partman. If you feel strongly about it you should lodge a bug report about the package to bugs.debian.org.

You may try with a TAB and then add console=ttyS0,115200 to the boot parameters somewhere early, and then you also need to tell qemu to offer the serial on the console perhaps multiplexed with the qemu monitor by adding -serial mon:stdio to its arguments. That will do well until the first reboot where you also need to have configured the bootup init system to offer serial login.

Which issue?

Clearly mount doesn't find any partition with label DEVUAN501 so the preamble moves on to the Ventoy patch in order to loopback the ISO image if it finds that, which it does. The loopback device is next presented to the installer which then is quite happy using that.

Sounds good. (though I wouldn't keep my software at a microsoft site)

Perhaps check out https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/ and get your package into the debian collection...

Ok.

Perhaps it requires "netconsole"  for entering password if you don't have console access.
See https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentatio … onsole.txt

That would  mean to use the "netconsole=" boot parameter rather than (or maybe together with) the "ip=" parameter. At the console end you can run a "socat" process, as per exmaple "3)" on that page.

EDIT: you might also want/need the pty option on the socat service, to make it "user friendlier".

EDIT 2: It's probably obvious, but I don't know anything about "clevis" or "tang", so keep filtering my loose ideas.