With lxqt, connman gets installed.

I think the ehci-orion message just happens to occur near the point when init tries to switch-root, and that's a common place for problems.

I can confirm that your basic procedure works. I have a new install of desktop-live on my hard drive, so I chrooted into it and started making isos. I had to do a little more, because it's an encrypted install, (remove conf/conf.d/cryptroot from initrd). Installed 4.15 from backports, did not remove 4.9, made another snapshot and it boots 4.15 normally.

Oh yeah, I had to remove intel-microcode before I could unpack and repack the initrd.

And I didn't backport anything. Just running ascii and chrooting into another ascii install. Maybe something else in jessie needs to be upgraded for this to work.

If the backports version doesn't work, try the ascii version. You should be able to install it in jessie. In the past (couple years ago) I used the sid version in debian jessie.

Upload trick:

Open up some port in your router (other than 80) and direct it to the local machine that's running a web server. Put your iso somwhere under /var/www/html so it can be downloaded from a remote location.
ssh into sourceforge
wget the iso from your webserver. If the connection breaks, repeat with wget -c and it will continue where it left off.
Close the port when you're done.

cp /boot/initrd.img-4.14-whatever .
mkdir extracted
cd extracted
zcat ../initrd.img-blah  | cpio -i

Then examine the files in conf/conf.d/. Look for something that has a wrong uuid or device name.

When you install a newer kernel, it takes over the symlinks, /vmlinuz and /initrd.img, which will be used by refractasnapshot. It copies them to  work/iso/live. The usual procedure is to install the new kernel first, then remove the old kernel. There are two reasons for doing it in this order: 1. Usually, the old kernel is running when you do this, so you can't remove it until you boot into the new kernel. 2. In case the new kenel doesn't work, you can still boot the old one. Since you're doing this in a chroot, it shouldn't matter.

If you want more than one kernel in the iso, you need to copy it to the same place with a different name, and you need to make a boot entry for it. Make sure you have set save_work=yes in the config file.

What do you mean by "installed a live build from chroot"?

There's something wrong in the initrd. Is this installed on a removable drive? ? Or from a snapshot that was made on a system that has a swap partition or an encrypted partition?

Edit: If you make a snapshot of a system that has more than one kernel, you may need to copy the extra kernel and initrd to $work_dir/iso/live/, and if you want both kernels available in the live iso, they must be named differently and you must create boot menu entries for the extra kernel.

I assume you're using jessie and using auto.mirror.devuan.org in your sources.list. Make sure you have the latest keyring installed and then switch to deb.devuan.org. apt-file should then work.

apt-get update
apt-get install devuan-keyring

# Then replace 'auto.mirror.devuan.org' with 'deb.devuan.org' in /etc/apt/sources.list

Then again:

apt-get update

To add your user to the sudo group:

adduser caluser sudo

Then log out and log in again.

I asked that question in irc about a year ago, and there happened to be one of the lxde devs in the channel. He said that lxde is still alive and is not going away.

I haven't tried mixing lxde and lxqt, but I'm about to. Just built a live iso with task-lxde-desktop and lxqt. There is some weirdness in the installed packages: I have both libpam-ck-connector and libpam-elogind, and you're only supposed to have one of those. Also, pam-auth-update shows both consolekit and elogind active. But I only have the libpolkits for consolekit, not elogind.

Please show me what you get for this:

for i in consolekit elogind policykit polkit libpam ; do aptitude search ~i"$i" ; done

lxde pulls in an odd combination of packages for both consolekit and elogind. All the other desktops are fine with one of those. (kde and lxqt use elogind, the others work with just consolekit.)

I was getting that error in lxde until I upgraded it today. You can probably just remove lxpolkit. You're not running the whole lxde desktop, right?

I see dbus and/or gtk errors almost every time I run any graphical program in a terminal. I ignore them if things are working.

You don't need the big swap unless you're planning to hibernate.
You don't need a boot flag for linux with msdos partition table.

For gpt disk with bios boot:

You need a 1MB or greater partition with no filesystem ("unformatted" in gparted, way at the bottom of the list)
and that partition needs a bios_grub flag (EF02 in gdisk). I've been putting this partition at the end.
You'll need at least one linux-formatted partition for the operating system.
You do not need an efi partition and you don't want the esp and boot flags on the linux partition. If you happen to have a real efi partition in addition to the others, it will just sit there and do nothing until you boot in uefi mode.

If you want to dual boot gpt disk with bios, you'll need another linux partition for the second linux installation. If you don't let the second one install a bootloader, you'll need to run update-grub on the first installation to add it to the boot menu. Either linux can be in charge of booting as long as you have a menu entry for the other one. (unless you're a fan of grub command line.)

For uefi boot:

You need a fat32 partition, around 50 - 500MB, with esp and boot flags. (Hint, just check esp in gparted and boot will get checked automatically.) (Hint2: I have 3 installations on one hard drive and the 200MB efi partition has 196MB free.)
You will need at least one partition for the OS, with a linux format and no flag.

If you want to dual boot on a uefi setup, you'll need another linux partition (exactly same advice as above regarding boot menus.)
The difference here is that the you will accumulate bootloaders in the efi partition. A different one for each distribution you install. Run efibootmgr to see the boot order or to make changes. Read the man page and especially read about uefi bootloaders at rodsbooks.com
http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/index.html

Edit: Ohhh... too many words up above. Read it anyway.

Catprints, please run it with 'refractainstaller -d' and save /var/log/refractainstaller_error.log. Then I can tell exactly where it failed. Thanks.

Siva, no script. I download them manually (possibly with a 'for' loop, depending on how lazy I feel). Some versions did not change between jessie and ascii, some did, and some names changed. (no more firmware-ralink).