I haven't needed to purge pulseaudio, but it can't hurt to do that.

It's also possible to record a stream in audacious using just alsa. In the audio settings, check the box for recording a stream, and a red button will appear on the toolbar.

Search for 'qjackctl tutorial' will bring up a bunch of hits. The one for ubuntu is a good basic one, and the one at the arch wiki will have all the gory details.

You can record a stream through vlc or audacious to audacity using JACK. You don't need pulseaudio. I use qjackctl for an easy gui interface to jackd.

You could drop to console and use the cli version of the installer.

# Press ctrl-alt-F2 to get to a command prompt.
sudo refractainstaller

Note that refractainstaller does not do any automatic partitioning. If you boot in uefi mode and you don't have an efi partition, the installer will complain.

I think you might have an easier time if you were working on an installed system. Install to a partition on hard drive or on a usb stick or in a virtual hard disk, and then you will be able to reboot during the upgrade.

xscreensaver is installed and set to run in the desktop's startup applications. It is disabled in the Screensaver settings.
xfce4-power-manager is set to suspend on lid closing. It is not set to lock the screen.

Closing lid puts computer into suspend and locks the screen. When I raise the lid, I get the xscreensaver login screen.

This is in Chimaera.

I have xscreensaver disabled and let xfce4-power-manager handle suspend and lock when lid is closed.

Install libpam-elogind and remove consolekit and libpam-ck-connector.

Correct. No live-tools package in your system.

Check the error log to see what happened with initramfs. If you run the cli version of refractasnapshot, add '-d' option to get a move verbose log. If you start the gui version from the menu, it's already in debug mode. (/var/log/refractasnapshot.log)

Check this, too:

dpkg -l | egrep "consolekit|logind|policykit|polkit|libpam|ck"

If the live-tools package is installed, update-initramfs gets diverted. You could run 'update-initramfs.orig.initramfs-tools...' instead. I prefer to remove or not install live-tools. I could never figure out what it was good for.

su was moved from the shadow source package to util-linux, and the behavior changed at that time. To revert to the old behavior (from man su):

echo 'ALWAYS_SET_PATH yes' >> /etc/default/su

To give user permission to run ping in chimaera:

dpkg-reconfigure iputils-ping

I'm not good with all that 'kit stuff, and I haven't had good luck with consolekit. I use elogind instead. But before messing with any of that, there's a more important question.

If this is running in ram from an iso, then it's a read-only system that can't be upgraded. If all the upgrades are happening in a persistent volume, then I think it's way past time to make a new iso. Please explain your setup a little more, because I don't really understand what you did. Thanks.

That's where you select the directory and then the thumbnails appear and you can select one.

You can have more than one debian/devuan live iso bootable on hard disk or usb. It depends on how you lay out the disk. I make multiboot live-usb devuan or debian systems all the time using refracta2usb.
https://refracta.org/docs/readme.refracta2usb.txt
https://sourceforge.net/projects/refrac … -2.4.3.deb