BTW, welcome to the forum.

A bit of research turned up that the baytrail atom chip received proper support in later kernels. With 4.9, most things worked, except audio (HDMI), and built in WiFi. A quick backport later and 4.19 was installed and everything is working. I ended up not using the built in WiFi as it is quite poor - so a USB dongle I had was used instead. Combined with a wireless keyboard and a 24 inch HDMI monitor I had, and the system was up and running.

Now it is not a powerhouse by any means, but it is surprisingly usable. I credit devuan for getting the most out of the hardware with no or little overheads. I suppose I wanted to post in case anyone else had one of these devices and was having problems. A quick search didn't turn up anything. I've installed a few things like stellarium (which works surprisingly well), and a few plugins for firefox to enable streaming video from my subscribed service. In fact everything I have tried works well - just don't try to compile your own kernel.....

I am writing this on the "toy". Anyway, if anybody has a compute stick stuck in a cupboard, get it out and install devuan.