A fresh install should go smoothly. The installer isos are just like installing debian. The live isos use refractainstaller. Install guides can be found on this page. (scroll down about half way)
https://devuan.org/get-devuan

Packages that we don't change can be downloaded from archive.debian.org and installed manually. Don't add the repo.

Packages that we do change can be found here. You have to know what version you want. The Packages.gz file for jessie-backports is empty, so I'm not even sure if the packages you find in pool will be for jessie-backports.
https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/devuan/pool/

I'll see if I can find out more.

No more jessie-backports or jessie-updates. Just jessie and jessie-security still work.

It depends on what you have installed and how good you are at getting around conflicts with the package manager. Scratch that. Package managers. Plural. Start with apt or apt-get upgrade, probably a couple times with a reboot in there, then try the dist upgrade and switch to aptitude when apt (and you) can't figure out what to do next.

Is this a system you actually use to do things you want to do? If it works, don't mess with it.

You got hit with an old version of devuan-baseconf. I think you had to hit the enter key on a dialog screen without noticing it said 'ceres' in the text-entry box. The updated version is in ceres now and won't add any lines to sources.list, but it also won't remove the lines that were added. Do that manually. It should be in beowulf soon, too.

The newer version will remove /data/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/05disable-recommends. (Bet you didn't notice that one.)

Sorry for the mixup.

That's true only for booting from usb. The changes to inittab will be present in the running  system. Since this is a live iso that uses refractainstaller, those changes will be copied to the hard drive (or SD card?) during installation and be persistent.

You might want to look at these before you run the installer. The install guide is for the graphical installer, but the cli installer is similar. Instead of getting lists of partitions to select from, you type in the partition (like /dev/sda1 or /dev/mmcblk0p1).

https://devuan.org/os/documentation/ins … e-gui.html
https://refracta.org/docs/readme.refractainstaller.txt

Your sources.list looks good.

Um, no. But let's see if we can figure out why lz4 is in modules.

Run dpkg -l | grep lz4 to see what apps are installed that have it in the name.
Then on each of those packages, run aptitude why <package> Maybe something you installed messed with those files.

Maybe also look in root's history to see if/when you edited that file.

Maybe install the debsums package and run debsums -ca to see what system files have been changed from their defaults.

Maybe 'aptitude reinstall initramfs-tools' would give you different results or other options. Try it with -s (--simulate).

Here's what I have in ascii:

$ ls -l /etc/initramfs-tools/
total 24
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 Apr 26  2017 conf.d
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 Apr 26  2017 hooks
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 1107 Feb 18  2017 initramfs.conf
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  246 Nov 10  2017 modules
drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 4096 Nov 10  2017 scripts
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  378 Oct 27  2014 update-initramfs.conf

I recognize this as the default. Yours has been changed. I don't understand why the reinstall failed.

$ cat /etc/initramfs-tools/modules 
# List of modules that you want to include in your initramfs.
# They will be loaded at boot time in the order below.
#
# Syntax:  module_name [args ...]
#
# You must run update-initramfs(8) to effect this change.
#
# Examples:
#
# raid1
# sd_mod

Are you running jessie, ascii or beowulf?

Check to see if the file is really missing or if it's there but has a permission problem
If it's missing, try reinstalling initramfs-tools.

I see only devuan and ascii in your sources. You're safe. If you started adding non-devuan or non-ascii sources, you could run into problems. Without pinning, apt will take the highest available version, so right now, if you installed/upgraded firefox-esr, you'd get 60.8 from ascii-security on auto.mirror, because that's a higher version than what's in deb.devuan.

But that will change in a few minutes or a couple hours. Repo is updating again. (Thanks, Ralph.)

I'm not marking the thread as Solved this time. Let's wait and see what happens.

05disable-suggests was a useless file. Suggests are not installed automatically. Disabling Recommends should be left to the user. Functions will be missing without them. I sure don't want to have to figure out which packages are missing when people come here with problems.

I agree that a lot of unnecessary bloat will also be missing without them. I exclude Recommends for myself and in my Refracta releases. I'm pretty sure some (most?) of the other Devuan derivatives also exclude them.

Is grub-efi-amd64-signed installed?  If so, replace it wtih grub-efi-amd64 unless you need secure-boot. (There's a different fix for that.)