I installed the Rasbian Devuan Image for arm on a Raspi 3.
I just used dd to the SD card on my laptop and it booted up fine.
Although I filled the SD card now I am getting some errors even after freeing some space.
I'll probably have to re-flash it at some point.
It was an ascii image.
I used it to mess around on systems

Only recently did i discover what "Raspberry pi" meant; go figure, i'm old and stupid.  Anyway, it sounds as though you are running out of storage on the SD card, which you recognize.  What you might *not* be aware of, is how abysmally lame linux is when it runs out of storage.  It's like, okay, so we're out of storage, what are we gonna do about it? We'll just run this tool like... oh, baobab maybe, (and i like baobab for what it's worth).  But the tool needs resources and they're all gone.  Catch-22, bigtime; if you haven't been there before.

linux needs to have a user-settable configuration parameter that specifies "how proactive do you want the system to be when storage is running low?"

Yeah, i know, why don't i build one. <g>  About the best i could do to help within my time constraints is to write some half-assed PHP utility to deal with it through a text-mode interface.  If that's potentially useful, let me know.  Otherwise, good luck, really; i think there's a chinese phrase that describes the lands we move into when resources run low, "qi-qi-gui-gui" if i've remembered it right, anyway it means "when strange things happen".

Does anyone have experience with the pi zero w? I've been trying to get it up and running, but so far nothing has worked out.
I couldn't get the wifi going, so decided to try ssh over usb. I followed the instructions for raspbian, no luck. The pi doesn't even
show up in dmesg.