If you're sure you can boot from the SD card, and you do that by selecting the SD card from the motherboard's boot device menu, then you should be able to install grub to the SD card, put / on the SD card, and put /home /var and swap on the HDD.

This will be a normal installation that can be updated/upgraded.

If you want to install to the usb stick, you should really use two sticks. But it is possible to boot to ram and then install to the same stick. The drawback is that you only get one chance. If you have to run the installer again, you have to dd the stick again.

When you partition the sdcard, leave 2MB free space before the first partition. Grub might need that. Gparted insists on leaving 1MB. Keep your eye on that.

See this thread for a solution to the shutdown delay:
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=674

I did an upgrade a few days ago, so there's nothing for me. I am able to install stuff from deb.devuan.org in beowulf. In another thread, we're still waiting for synaptic to enter beowulf. It went into buster a couple days ago.

Anyway, I have alerted the appropriate authorities. Today is a holiday, so responses might be slow.

Geoff, thanks for the report.

User has sudo nopasswd enabled for halt, reboot, pm-suspend and pm-hibernate.  Oh, you might have disabled that in the install. If so...

echo "user ALL= NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/pm-suspend, /usr/sbin/pm-hibernate, /sbin/halt, /sbin/reboot" > /etc/sudoers.d/user_shutdown

To restore it.

Right-click on the desktop should give you the openbox menu, and I've added reboot and shutdown. Warning: Those two work without asking for confirmation.

You can tie the logout in lxpanel to one of the quit-dialog scripts in /usr/local/bin. I missed that and should add it to the blend.

elogind would pull in policykit-1 and dbus, and the user would be able to use the dbus shutdown commands.

Thanks for the live-config info. I didn't know that. That same file, .su-to-rootrc was causing me trouble with policykit. Anyone who has installed with any but the latest version of refractainstaller might want to get rid of that file if it's present.

Miyo, if you really want to live on the edge, boot to ram and install to the same usb you booted from. Then there's no confusion about which one is the target.

Guess I should have re-read this thread before uploading new isos. These are beowulf.

https://get.refracta.org/files/experimental/

No dbus (just some libs), no *kits, no libsystemd0, most of the same apps that go into the xfce builds.
You can probably get rid of most of the dbus libs if you remove abiword and transmission.
You can replace xpdf with atril. (Not sure if that'll pull in dbus libs again, but it won't pull in dbus. I left it out to keep the iso size down.)

Made with live-sdk. I'll post the blend files when I decide where to put them.

It looks like you were able to do an upgrade in devuan while running systemd. Is that correct? Did apt complain? Or did you install sysvinit first?

1+

Thanks for testing and for the nice write-up. It looks pretty easy. I've tried a few upgrades from ascii to beowulf, and those were easy.

To free up the memory that mate is using, drop to console (ctrl-alt-F2) log in as root and stop your display manager.
/etc/init.d/slim stop Or replace slim in that command with lightdm or whatever dm you're using. Replace stop with start in that command when you're ready to go back to the desktop.

To read all about booting uefi:
https://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/index.html

Look around in your bios for a Legacy or CSM boot setting. It's also possible that the boot device menu gives you a choice of legacy or uefi. You can usually get to this menu by pressing some key at boot (at the motherboard/computer logo) maybe F12, F11, F8, ESC, or other. Pressing DEL usually gets you to the bios.

Refracta 9.1 (13 Apr 2019)
https://get.refracta.org/files/stable/

Atril added 124mb. I give up on the 700mb limit.
It still fits on a 1gb usb stick!

The DNG message that golinux linked earlier in this thread is gone. I think I know what it pointed to - there was a patch submitted by Didier Kryn for /etc/init.d/networking that fixes the problem. I have the patch, and I have the message in my mail. Both are copied below.

I don't know if the line numbers in the patch are still correct, but I do know that it works in ascii. I've applied it manually.

check-link-state.patch

--- networking~	2016-09-16 15:02:20.000000000 +0200
+++ networking	2017-12-18 17:25:49.902781233 +0100
@@ -112,7 +112,12 @@ ifup_hotplug () {
 			    done)
 	    if [ -n "$ifaces" ]
 	    then
-		ifup $ifaces "$@" || true
+		# link detection does not work unless we up the link
+		ip link set "$iface" up || true
+		if [ "$(cat /sys/class/net/$link/operstate)" = up ]
+		then
+		    echo "$iface"
+		fi
 	    fi
     fi
 }

Try this link instead:
https://www.youtube.com/dyneorg/live

They didn't give us any name tags. We're being forced to talk to each other and remember names. Maybe the video with the introductions will be posted today. The 40-minute video for day zero that's there now only shows some of the unstructured time and is pretty much useless. (That unstructured time was not useless for those of us here - we're all getting to know each other just as it was intended.)

Having a great time. Will be back home in a few days.
fsr