Yes, it's still possible to run without usrmerge in devuan. If you use one of our installer isos, you will be asked whether you want it or not. Default is not.

Last time I tried to install zoom in devuan, they (zoom) only had packages for stretch. Those should work on ascii, however both stretch and ascii have been retired.

Go to your zoom meeting in chromium. If you get an exo-open popup window, get rid of it. Ignore all pleas to install the zoom crap and scroll down the page until you see a link in microscopic text that says something like "Join the meeting using your web browser." and do that. It works just fine.

The amd64 live isos have grub-efi-amd64 installed and the grub-pc deb package available inside the iso for bios boots. If the iso is booted in uefi mode, it installs grub-efi. If the iso is booted in bios mode, the installer will install grub-pc. If you boot in bios mode and chroot the installed system, you need to install the grub-pc package before running grub-install. It's in the root of the filesystem. So run dpkg -i /grub-pc*.deb before running grub-install.

If the iso is booted in bios mode and the disk has gpt partition table, the installer will warn you that you need a special partition for grub, at least 1mb with no filesystem and with flag bios_grub (in gparted) or ef03 (in gdisk).

Edit: Just after hitting Submit, I saw that the first message says this happened after an upgrade. Now I'm not sure if my answer if relevant.

One more time...

Newer chimaera live isos (4.0.2) are uploaded. I'm sure I tested the installer this time and it works.
(note: torrent and magent link haven't been updated yet at this time Sep 10, 16:36 UTC.)

refractainstaller base & gui 9.6.3 are built and will migrate down through the repos. I'll rebuild isos this weekend.

They're also here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/refracta/files/tools/
(for anyone who can't wait or those who are not using devuan)

For the installer isos, yeah, you need to chroot. But for the live isos, you don't. The desktop-live has the entire xfce desktop for you to work with plus all the system commands. It is a full system, and the live installer just copies the running system to hard disk. That means any changes you make in configs or packages in the running system will be copied to the installation. The minimal-live doesn't have xorg, but it's still a complete system and will act the same way, just in console only.

New live isos with new repo key and new refractainstaller with anacron fix are uploaded.

I don't know the details of how it works, but grub has modules for crypto and for luks. Look under /boot/grub/.

Yeah, I almost warned you about the double password entry. It's very slow, too. I should have said that I recommend it if that's what you really want. Another way to make /boot secure is to remove it from the hard disk and put it on a usb stick. Then you can't boot without the stick. (also inconvenient.)

Yes, new live isos are coming soon. The fixed version of the installer is currently in chimaera-proposed-updates.

To use the current isos, wget the new keyring in the live session, and install it with dpkg or gdebi before running the installer.

If you download the file and want a checksum, here they are:

$ md5sum devuan-keyring_2022.09.04_all.deb 
6209781a66b39c95c012765bc7ca2297  devuan-keyring_2022.09.04_all.deb

$ sha256sum devuan-keyring_2022.09.04_all.deb 
96c4a206e8dfdc21138ec619687ef9acf36e1524dd39190c040164f37cc3468d  devuan-keyring_2022.09.04_all.deb

New keyring just got built and needs to get into the repos and propagate to the mirrors.

0:0 is the display you're running on. If you run more than one xserver at a time, they will get unique display numbers.
I don't know what programs supply any of this, but I learned this early in my linux adventures.

Create a second user.
Drop to console with ctrl-alt-F1 (or I guess crtl-shift-F1 on your keyboard)
Log in as the second user.
Run startx -- :1
You will now be in an xsession as the second user on vt08 and display :1.
ctrl-alt-F7 to go to the first xsession
ctrl-alt-F8 to get back to the second xsession
When you're done playing, close that second xsession, log out second user and go back to vt07.