Fixed in ceres and will move into daedalus soon.
https://bugs.devuan.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=635

Here are the main changes. I also changed calls for update-notifier.sh to update-notifier2.sh instead. I'm too lazy to see which files they were in. It makes more sense to change the name of the script (drop the "2" since there's only one of them.)

Note the change in the she-bang. We may get stuck with usr-merge in the not too distant future, and /bin/bash will go away. It won't go far, but using '/usr/bin/env bash' will survive the change.

/etc/default/update-notifier

# Set the default action for clicking on the notification icon.
# Valid choices: 
# "none" to only see a list of available upgrades.
# "terminal" to run the upgrade in a terminal
# "gui" to run the upgrade in synaptic package manager.

FRONTEND="terminal"

# Change the terminal if you don't have xterm.
# End your terminal command with the option that runs a command inside the terminal.
# Example:
# TERMINAL_COMMAND="/usr/bin/xfce4-terminal"
# TERMINAL_OPTIONS="-e"

TERMINAL_COMMAND="/usr/bin/xterm"
TERMINAL_OPTIONS="-fa mono -fs 12 -e"

/usr/local/bin/upgrade.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash

source /etc/default/update-notifier

killall yad

if [ "$FRONTEND" = terminal ] ; then
	pkexec env DISPLAY=$DISPLAY XAUTHORITY=$XAUTHORITY "${TERMINAL_COMMAND} ${TERMINAL_OPTIONS}" 'apt-get dist-upgrade'
elif [ "$FRONTEND" = gui ] ; then
	synaptic-pkexec --dist-upgrade-mode --non-interactive
fi

exit 0

/usr/local/bin/update-notifier2.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash

list=$(apt-get -s dist-upgrade | awk '/^Inst/ { print $2 }')

count=$(echo "$list" | wc -l)

if [ -n "$list" ] ; then

	notify-send --expire-time=20000 --icon="/usr/share/pixmaps/updates.svg" \
"Available updates: $count

$list"

	yad --notification \
		--image="/usr/share/pixmaps/updates.svg" \
		--icon-size=22 \
		--command="/usr/local/bin/upgrade.sh" \
		--text="Available updates: $count
	_____________________
	
$list" &

fi

exit 0

Done.

Yes, F1 at the slim login screen is to change to a different desktop environment or window manager. There is no switch-user with slim. It's named slim for a reason.

Looks like lightdm IS dm-tool. There's not much else. 

~$ apt-file find dm-tool
lightdm: /usr/bin/dm-tool                 
lightdm: /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/dm-tool
lightdm: /usr/share/man/man1/dm-tool.1.gz

lightdm will also pull in lightdm-gtk-greeter

What is the output from the following commands?

cat /proc/asound/cards
aplay -l
aplay -L
lspci

There's a refracta-lang live-config script that fixes the lightdm problem, but it appears to no longer work.

I'd really like to know why it's broken only in this build. I can go back to using lxdm, which I used in the last two releases because it does respect the language choice.

If you want daedelus, you could probably debootstrap ceres, wait a couple months and the change sources to daedelus and do a dist-upgrade. Otherwise you could make the symlink yourself in /usr/share/debootstrap/scripts/, but I don't see the point of running daedelus at this time. We haven't started working on it yet.

It's possible that something your hardware needs is not in the initramfs in the minimal-live. There's a script used in the build that edits the initrd to remove a bunch of stuff. I've never examined this script closely. KatolaZ wrote it, and I just keep re-using it.
https://git.devuan.org/devuan-sdk/live- … _initrd.sh

Here's the list of packages installed in the minimal-live. Anything you want that isn't already in the refracta-nox that you installed can easily be added. This is the beowulf package list. There are only a few of these that are not available in chimaera. (firmware-ralink comes to mind.)
https://git.devuan.org/devuan-sdk/live- … ulf/config

I haven't used vbox in a long time, but I've always had to get out of the uefi shell with ESC or exit (or both) to get to a menu that lets me boot from a file. Drill down until you find grubx64.efi or other uefi boot file.

Bernie, the OP in this thread is using a netinstall iso, not a live iso.

FYI: gparted requires a graphical environment. If there are issues beyond that, please file a bug report for refractainstaller-base or start a separate thread about it. Thanks.

Nixer, your pinning looks safe. My pin file looks much less safe, and I will not post it in full here. I have a bunch of repos enabled just so I can check package versions. 

I don't think you need to use negative numbers. I generally use a priority of 10 or 50 or sometimes 1 for things I want to use selectively.

You can use codenames with 'n=<codename>' as in my example. This is from my beowulf (my main computer.)

Package: *
Pin: release n=chimaera
Pin-Priority: 50

Package: *
Pin: release n=ceres
Pin-Priority: 50

If you have nothing pinned, running apt-policy will show you the default priorities of all the repos you have enabled. I think backports is 100 by default and experimental is 1.

See man apt_preferences for all the details.

You regulars know what you're doing. I wouldn't want to discourage you from going out on thin ice. Someone has to do it.

A good compromise between testing and unstable is to have both in your sources and pin ceres to a lower priority. Then you will just get packages from the testing suite unless you specify that you want something from ceres. This can be helpful when something breaks and the fix gets put into ceres. You don't have to wait for it to move to the testing suite.

Beowulf to Chimara: yes, change sources, update, upgrade/dist-upgrade. There has been some problem with upgrading eudev in some cases. I'm not sure what the exact circumstances are to create that problem, but there's a fix coming to chimaera very soon.