You posted the following. There's no error message saying that stretch-backports does not exist, so you must have had stretch-backports in your sources at some point:

To see if you pulled in packages from backports or testing, you can run

aptitude search ~i -F"%p# %v# %t#"

but I'm not sure it will be entirely accurate. I'm running jessie, and it shows most of my packages are from "stable" with a few from "jessie-backports". If there are packages from ascii or stretch, they should show up as "testing".

For packages that have not been devuanized, you won't be able to tell whether you pulled it from debian or devuan unless you can find a version mismatch, Where debian has a different version than devuan, and you have installed the version from debian. Right now, the only example I can think of is chromium-60 in stretch security vs. chromium-59 from ascii. If you were running ascii and had chromium-60 running and you didn't get it from the ceres repo, you would have gotten it from debian.

For reference, here are some other useful commands: https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=511

I checked with someone who knows more than both of us put together (CenturionDan):

Until you get more space on /dev/sda3, nothing you do can be trusted to work. Get it to less than 95% full. And figure out what's taking up all the space in /var/log. (Please don't answer with just "logs". Which ones and how big are they?)

To post text from console:

cat <filename> | nc termbin.com 9999

and then post the link it gives you.

It means I'm confused and thinking of playing media files with a plain ssh connection instead of using sshfs. The latter works correctly and plays on the local machine. Thanks.

If you just want to access the server from the local network, nfs will work. You can either add the nfs shares to the fstabs of the clients, or you could install autofs and set it up so the shares get mounted automatically when someone tries to access those files. There's also sshfs, which is more secure, but won't work right for audio/video (it plays on the server instead of the client.)

Look for a howto on setting up nfs on debian. Same for autofs if you want that.

I just did an upgrade to ascii, and I was having the opposite problem. Synaptic and gparted would start without asking for a password. Only worked with the primary user. I noticed that policykit-1-gnome had been removed, so I reinstalled it, and now synaptic and gparted won't start for the user. User can still use pkexec to create another user but has to use the full path for the adduser command.

I ran into this a few days ago and ended up downloading it from https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/ for a friend. We can't get it to work. I already have flashplugin-nonfree installed from long ago, and when I go to about:plugins, I don't see it listed. And neither of us could see some items on one site that requires flash. Debian wiki looked helpful, but as I said, the plugin didn't seem to work and doesn't show up in the list of plugins. I don't know what's going on with it.

Same behavior in a devuan jessie that got upgraded to ascii, and then again when upgraded to ceres.

pkexec allows primary user to install and remove software (didn't test gparted this time)
It does not allow primary user to create a new user, and it does not let the second user install software.

I will get around to filing a bug report.

Easy fix for the change in network names - revert to the old names by adding "net.ifnames=0" to the boot command.

You can add it to /etc/default/grub, next to "quiet" (will only affect the default boot choice) or in the line below (will affect all boot entries.)

Before making a snapshot, add it to /usr/lib/refractasnapshot/iso/isolinux/live.cfg (ang grub.cfg.template if you're enabling uefi boot.)

Note: this will be a config option in a future version of snapshot.

Note2: It's likely that eudev will be configured to reverse this behavior (i.e. you'll need net.ifnames=1 if you want the new names.)

It's there in backports. You have to tell it to install linux-base when you tell it to install the kernel. Use
'apt-get -t jessie-backports install linux-base linux-image-4.9-whatever'

I can! I can!

1. Make sure automount is NOT enabled for usb.
2. Plug in your thumb drive.
3. Run 'refracta2usb' from a root terminal (or sudo).
4. Click on the Help option. Read the first few paragraphs.

Keep in mind that it's like a Swiss army knife - it has a bunch of utensils in case you ever need them, but you'll probably never use all of them. Just pick the one(s) you need at any given time.

Hint: create a vfat that's big enough to fit a few isos and an ext partition for other uses, but don't use it yet. Get one iso running then talk to me about persistence (or read the rest of the Help).

If you get a popup error window and you see the word "rescan" in it, go back to the main menu and Rescan. (It happens a lot if you do multiple procedures in the same run. It's not a bug. That's just the way it is - stick gets unmounted after you do a task.)

Were you installing software in a chroot? That would account for /run being absent.

The error about missing /home/devuan is weird. I don't know what to say about that.

save_work=yes

Keep it that way unless you need to reclaim the space. (You already said you don't need to.) It will save time because rsync only copies changes after the first time.

Network problem: easily solved by adding 'net.ifnames=0' to the boot command. Since you saved your work, you can very easily add this in without running the whole process again. To test it, press TAB at boot menu and edit the line.
- Edit /home/work/iso/isolinux/live.cfg  (the boot menu)
- Run refractasnapshot again and choose the 4th option (Re-run xorriso, (make iso, no-copy, no squash). It'll take a minute or so.
   (Note: this will only work for changes in the root of the CD. It won't work for changes in the copied filesystem.)

Next time you do a full run, start it from terminal in debug mode -

refractasnapshot -d
or
refractasnapshot-gui -d