All scripts with their fonts uploaded just now to GitHub.

See Powered-by-Devuan.

I do not know of a single story, Neil, nor even a set of small stories.

It *is* a combination of RedHat & one of their in-house developers that was responsible for systemD.

It was small things that began to develop, grow & only after a long period became threatening to the fundamentals of the Linux project. One feature is that early on Linus Torvalds became incandescent with anger at the attitude of the SystemD developer.

Example:
Shortly after the turn of the Millenium I had a server loaded with RedHat RHEL3 ("RedHat Enterprise Linux version 3") (it may have been v2, but I think it was v3). The physical server was owned by myself, but 2 lads had built it for me, loaded RHEL on to it, and arranged for it to be placed into an internet-backbone-connected server house. Now we come to the murky stuff:

1. The RH licence for the software said that it should be paid per server, but the lads that copied it onto my server just ignored that
   (they had a separate server with a paid-for licence for RHEL3, and copied it from that server to mine)

2. Only after I had paid for everything did I discover all of the above, plus the fact that the licence was due to expire in a couple of months.

3. I had other troubles with the folks that built the server; we parted ways shortly after, and my server was transferred to another server-house.

4. RH copyrighted the RHEL software under the GPL

5. A free version of RHEL was produced as 'CentOS', and I used that to upgrade my server

6. Only much later did I discover that the same folks that built my server were behind CentOS

7. RH needed a steady income stream, and in part ensured that by continually upgrading RHEL's version

8. CentOS was a threat to RedHat's income

9. It was possible to easily in-place upgrade CentOS at each version upgrade until CentOS4

10. CentOS5 was a bugger to in-place upgrade, but a method was found & published

11. RH learnt from that, and made RHEL6 (and thus CentOS6) impossible to upgrade in-place (the server had to be wiped & freshly installed)

12. I stopped running a server at this point

@golinux:
This is the logo as you describe you would want it:

convert devuan-logo.png \
          -gravity North   -background transparent   -splice 0x18 \
          -font NimbusSans-Regular -pointsize 15.3 \
          -annotate +18+7 'Powered by'  devuan-powered-by-golinux-dream.png

I think that looks weird, and the 'Powered by' looks better if properly centred (or far right, whichever):

convert devuan-logo.png \
          -gravity North   -background transparent   -splice 0x18 \
          -font NimbusSans-Regular -pointsize 15.3 \
          -annotate +0+7 'Powered by'  devuan-powered-by-centred.png

I've emailed you three logos.

Added Sunday 20 Aug:
Completely changed my mind about your special (golinux-dream). After sleeping & re-looking at them that option blends very nicely with the other letters. Anyway, I spent a couple of hours refining them all & you now have an email with a TAR.GZ of 25 files (both IM6 scripts + the PNGs that each script produces + the original logo). The 2nd set of 12 files is a copy of the original 6 using NIMBUS-SANS-NARROW. I had to use a bigger point to get the same length so that it bridged the logo correctly and, all-in-all, I think it the best of the bunch. See what you think.

I do not know IM well enough to be certain, but I believe that there may be a clue in the following:

On the IM cli font page it speaks of a -list font option. For 'convert' that leads to an XML file that suggests that the default font (for me with IM6) is AvantGarde-Book:

$ convert -list font | head

Path: /etc/ImageMagick-6/type-urw-base35.xml
  Font: AvantGarde-Book
    family: AvantGarde
    style: Normal
    stretch: Normal
    weight: 400
    glyphs: /usr/share/fonts/type1/urw-base35/URWGothic-Book.t1

The startup scripts (remember, this is initscripts, not systemd) are in /etc/init.d, etc:

/etc/init.d/ntp
/etc/rc2.d/S03ntp
/etc/rc2.d/S03ntpsec
/etc/rc3.d/S03ntp
/etc/rc3.d/S03ntpsec
/etc/rc4.d/S03ntp
/etc/rc4.d/S03ntpsec
/etc/rc5.d/S03ntp
/etc/rc5.d/S03ntpsec

This is the init.d script:

Now you can trace the scripts through & find out where it is failing (although you should have more than one error message to tell you what is happening.

HTH

An important difference between Chimaera & Daedalus where firmware is concerned (affecting graphics, bluetooth & all the rest): the Chimaera sources.list is as rolfie set out, but Daedalus is different:

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus                  main non-free-firmware non-free contrib
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-updates          main non-free-firmware non-free contrib
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-security         main non-free-firmware non-free contrib
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-proposed-updates main non-free-firmware non-free contrib
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-backports        main non-free-firmware non-free contrib

Comment-out the last two lines whilst you install.

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade involved ~2,000 files & the final sudo apt autoremove involved scores of files being removed.

Considering the size of the install (it was huge) it went without problems. Restarting (new kernel) gave a blank screen, which was heart-stopping (I've had to do repairs on remote servers from the grub command-line in the past and do not want to ever have to repeat that again). Restarting the computer then gave Recovering Journal which is excellent considering the alternative, but not really something that you want to see.

Naturally I've got gripes. Don't much like the colour scheme (sorry, the blue is too bright for my taste). The fonts are different everywhere. mlocate has gone & been replaced by plocate.

The grub startup screen was missing the Devuan theme, and the default Debian grub screen is pants. It probably happened due to a wrong choice during setup, but here is how to fix that: The file to look for is /etc/default/grub. There were two files in that dir:

1. grub

2. grub.ucf-old

Doing a diff showed that the old file referenced the Devuan theme. I therefor added the following line at the bottom of 'grub':

$ tail /etc/default/grub
# Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true

# Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries
#GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"

# Uncomment to get a beep at grub start
#GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1"

GRUB_THEME=/usr/share/desktop-base/grub-themes/desktop-grub-theme/theme.txt

The final fix is to run update-grub and now the Devuan theme shows on startup.

You are right. Shift-f5 & there we are: "Daedalus 5.0 is the current stable release."

Ah well. Let's see how well prepared everything is.

I'm waiting for the "official" Daedalus release. Thanks for the info.

xfce4 has it's own 'startx': /usr/bin/startxfce4. Here is the head (options at bottom):

$ head -50 /usr/bin/startxfce4
#!/bin/sh
#
#  xfce4
#
#  Copyright (C) 1996-2003 Olivier Fourdan (fourdan@xfce.org)
#
#  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
#  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
#  the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
#  (at your option) any later version.
#
#  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
#  GNU General Public License for more details.
#
#  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
#  along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
#  Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
#

if test "x$*" != "x"
then
  OPTS=""
  for OPT in $*
  do
    if test "x$OPT" = "x--help"
    then
      # print help and exit
      echo "Usage:"
      echo "  startxfce4 [OPTIONS...]"
      echo
      echo "Options:"
      echo "  --help                   Show help options"
      echo "  --with-ck-launch         Start xfce4-session inside a"
      echo "                           ConsoleKit session"
      echo

      exit 0
    elif test "x$OPT" = "x--with-ck-launch"
    then
      # try to launch xfce4-session with ck-launch-session in xinitrc
      XFCE4_SESSION_WITH_CK="1"
      export XFCE4_SESSION_WITH_CK
    else
      # append
      OPTS="$OPTS $OPT"
    fi
  done

Perhaps try that?

Agree. Which is why WINE is (IMO) deprecated for modern Linux, which almost entirely is powered by 64-bit cpus.