Two suggestions.

1. Press ctrl-alt-F7 to see if you can find your running desktop (or graphical login screen)
2. As root, run /etc/init.d/sddm restart and see if you get any useful messages. Try finding the desktop again, too. Maybe check all the vts (ctrl-alt-F1, F2, etc.)

I see it in the list of Recommended packages, but it's not in the list of packages to be installed, and I am not excluding Recommends. I'm testing on a daedalus desktop-live iso booted in qemu. Here's where those two Recommends come from. You cannot install them in devuan. You can proceed without excluding Recommends.

root@devuan:/home/devuan# apt rdepends systemd
<systemd>
root@devuan:/home/devuan# aptitude why systemd
i   ntp    Depends    ntpsec
i A ntpsec Recommends systemd | cron | cron-daemon
root@devuan:~# aptitude why systemd-coredump
i   task-xfce-desktop Recommends xfce4-goodies
i A xfce4-goodies     Depends    xfce4-notifyd | notification-daemon | notify-os
                                 d
p   plasma-workspace  Provides   notification-daemon
p   plasma-workspace  Depends    drkonqi (>= 5.27.5~)
p   drkonqi           Recommends systemd-coredump

The desktop-live isos only provide a single desktop, which includes everything you get when you install task-xfce-desktop. If you want a different desktop, it's probably better to use one of the installer isos. You can choose the desktop you want from the installer and get a fat installation with everything, or you can un-check the desktop stuff and start with a console-only system to add exactly what you want.

Instead of archiving the packages to install, you could just archive the installation itself with all the tools you need already installed and working. Install the system in a virtual machine made with open source tools and you have the entire system inside a single file that you can move around and keep in a safe place.

The use for encrypted persistence is so that nobody can steal your live-usb and read your personal files.

Using a usb to provide encryption keys for an installed system is a completely different but equally valid case.

I've done it with sshfs, either mounting a directory from the host on the VM or the other way, mounting a directory in the VM on the host.  The former can be done without any network options in the qemu command. You do need to have sshfs installed.

sshfs user@host-ip:/home/user/some-subdirectory  some-mountpoint-in-the-VM

fusermount -u some-mountpoint-in-the-VM   # to un-mount the share

I've done it with nfs, too. That's a little more involved. You can even set it up with autofs so the share mounts automatically when you access the mountpoint.

These instructions will work with devuan repos. Don't use any debian.org repos.

https://wiki.debian.org/QEMU
https://wiki.debian.org/VirtualBox

Yes, runit was in use when I did the upgrade. I used a chimaera-runit live iso to install into a VM and then I upgraded the installation. I don't recall any special problems with it.

Your grub-install code for grub-coreboot looks right. That's based on my reading the package description - it seems to be a replacement for grub-pc, grub-efi* and some others.

The motherboard settings (bios or uefi) determine what gets booted. If it's set for uefi, then it looks for a bootloader in the efi partition. If it's set for legacy bios, it looks at the mbr. In the case of the live-isos, there's an efi partition inside the iso with the uefi bootloader. For a bios boot, the live-isos use isolinux.

Here's a blend file for live-sdk. Starting on line 189 is the section that makes the uefi bootloader for the iso. There are a couple of places when grub modules get included.
https://git.devuan.org/devuan-sdk/live- … live.blend

The isolinux bootloader is configured in live-sdk/lib/libdevuansdk/zlibs/iso and adds (all?) modules from /usr/lib/syslinux/modules/bios.

You keep saying "encrypted snapshot" but I don't know if you can have the contents of the iso encrypted. You can have the iso ready to install an encrypted system, and you can have it ready to make a live-usb with encrypted persistence.

To install an encrypted system, you need cryptsetup, cryptsetup-bin, cryptsetup-run, cryptsetup-initramfs (that's the one that's usually missing) and whatever else comes in with those.

OK, I checked the iso to be sure and both shim-signed and shim-unsigned are installed.

Try editing /etc/refractainstaller.conf to uncomment the line that says media_opt="--force-extra-removable"

Another possibility, either before or after trying the above, is to install grub manually (in chroot) when you get to that part of the installer. Make sure that the efi partition is mounted at /boot/efi when installing the bootloader.

OK, good that you got it installed. Keep in mind that apt doesn't know about it and the package won't get upgraded automatically.

I can explain a couple of the errors you were getting.

"Command not found" occurs when the package name is the first item on the line. That can happen when you copy/paste a list of package names - you paste more than one wrapped line.

The packages that can't be found have incomplete names. There is no libx11 but there are a bunch of libx11 packages. Same goes for libxext and those others. For example:

$ apt-cache search libxext
libxext-dev - X11 miscellaneous extensions library (development headers)
libxext-doc - X11 miscellaneous extensions library (documentation)
libxext6 - X11 miscellaneous extension library

If you don't need the latest upstream version, then it would probably be easier to use the debian source and debian tools to rebuild the package the way you want it. Take a look at this: https://raphaelhertzog.com/2010/12/15/h … -packages/