It's not working for me today, either. I can --search-keys with my email address and get a list of my public keys. I can't get the fingerprints and I can't --recv-keys. Also can't --refresh-keys on my main machine - I get "keyserver error" with that.

Searching my email address on the web interface at pgp.mit.edu also fails with:

The problem is with them, not with us.

Been running xfce4 on my 2GHz Athlon X2 with 2GB RAM for more than 10 years. Been running it in jessie on an old Dell Inspiron 1525 (One of the early ubuntu models) with Pentium dual-core at 1.6GHz for a couple years with no problems. I did notice that ascii booted very slowly on the Dell until I added nomodeset to the boot line.

I ran lxde on the Athlon X2 box for about a year, and I didn't notice any difference in performance between that and xfce.

Here's some slightly more objective evidence: I can run xfce comfortably in a virtualbox VM with 384mb ram. (as long as I don't open firefox). For gnome2 or kde4 or ubuntu with unity I need to give it 640mb, and programs open so slowly I can't stand it.

If you have the key ID, you can get the fingerprint with

gpg --fingerprint <key-id>

Oh, if you don't have the key ID, you can use the email address. Try it with mine, and you'll get a list.

I noticed that about dirmngr in ascii. That must be new - I don't have that package installed in jessie and gpg has always worked right.

Two possible solutions for that. 1. Do it in a virtual machine. 2. Install to a usb thumb drive just like you would to a hard drive.

The installer isos use debian-installer. It pulls packages either from the repository or from the dvd and installs them into the new system. The live isos use refractainstaller, which copies the running live system to hard drive. If you're familiar with installing debian, then you would know whether or not you used d-i when you installed devuan before.

Installing from the live takes about 10 minutes. Installing from packages (netinstall or dvd) takes a bit longer. You could have a good or bad result with either method, depending on your hardware and what you do with the install.

Check to make sure you have the right versions of all those libraries listed in my codebox above.
(should be version 0.105-15~deb8u3+devuanSEC1)

Check removable device settings in xfce.

When you plug in a usb stick, do you get an icon on the desktop? If so, can you mount/open it from there?

I doubt that the beowulf version of openrc will work in ascii. If you look at my old instructions, you'll see that libfdisk1 and util-linux are needed, and those two packages haven't been devuanized in beowulf yet. I have no idea if the ascii versions of those libraries will work with the beowulf openrc.

The openrc package itself is unchanged from debian, so yes, you could download the deb from buster. The other way to get it would be to add beowulf to sources.list and also pin beowulf to a lower priority, so you'd have to explicitly request packages from beowulf if you wanted them. (see 'man apt_preferences' for info on pinning.)

For reference, obsolete instructions: https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=4443#p4443

I hope you made an installable live-iso of your system before you try this.

Yup. My concern is whether someone will need it to get online or not, wired or wireless.

I did remember to include wireless firmware from backports in the live-iso I made with the backports kernel.   Only a few of them are there.

How does it not work? Did you get an error message? Please post the contents of /etc/apt/sources.list

You should get something like this when you run that command:

# apt-get -t jessie-security install policykit-1
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  libpolkit-agent-1-0 libpolkit-backend-1-0 libpolkit-gobject-1-0
The following packages will be upgraded:
  libpolkit-agent-1-0 libpolkit-backend-1-0 libpolkit-gobject-1-0 policykit-1
4 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 354 not upgraded.
Need to get 173 kB of archives.
After this operation, 298 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

This looks odd.

You can start synaptic with gksudo or pkexec. No need to use both.
gksudo synaptic
or
synaptic-pkexec

Are you sure you need one? At what point in the installation is it asking for a driver, and what does the message say?
Did you choose expert or regular install?

apt-listchanges is informative. In my experience, it's not very useful in the stable distribution, but can be very helpful when you're running the testing version. I don't recall why I included it. Maybe it's there from when ascii was still in testing.

Oh, now I see the problem. Commenting out lines like that doesn't work in bash. It does work in zsh (I do that in the config file in live-sdk.) I guess you'd need to remove those two lines entirely.

Non-free firmware is in the installer isos, but you won't find those packages in the installed system. They don't get copied (neither does the rest of what's under /pool.) If your hardware requires a firmware package, it will get automatically installed in the regular install, and if you choose expert install and use a mirror, you will be asked about non-free firmware.

'aptitude search <some-nonfree-firmware-package>' should give you results only if you have non-free repos enabled in sources.list. It works in the live iso because those packages are installed. (I think that's what's going on here.)

You're right - I did not include the firmware-amd-graphics package in the /firmware directory, but it is installed. I only included the wireless firmware using the logic that you would only need that to get a connection, then you could get anything else. Also, that /firmware directory is in the root of the live filesystem, not in the root of the iso like it is in the installer isos.

dpkg -l | grep firmware will list all installed packages with 'firmware' in the name.
aptitude search ~ifirmware will do the same.
locate firmware will list all files on the system with 'firmware' in the name. (assuming you have a locate package installed and updatedb has run at least once since the system was installed.)
find / -name "firmware*" will find all files that start with 'firmware'. (you'll need to be root for this one.)