So I had to make an expert install with no /home partition,
and evaded lvm.
Partition  / , Partition /tmp Partition /usr , Partition /usr/local/ small , all <= 6 GB
The rest for Partition /var 230 GB .
Installation successfull.

pager /proc/meminfo
/bin/sh : command not found

so far the pager in busybox and/or the d-i

Ha! Yes, well, my point was more general — why cat the content of a file to another file and then read the other file when you could just use a pager (any pager) to read the file. But anyway...

^ This raises my suspicions.

How exactly did you transfer the ISO image to the USB stick?

If you used the correct method then the image itself would erase old partitions.

Is that everything you see when you check TTY4?

There is https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=79785 in which the OP was trying to use debootstrap on an NTFS partition. Would that apply here?

Lolwut?

pager /proc/meminfo

pager /proc/meminfo
/bin/sh : command not found

so far the pager in busybox and/or the d-i

I spent the day with digging in this horrible old BIOS and the Interaction with messed up USB sticks,
which do not behave as one would expect when isos are copied to them without proper complete erasing old partitions, mbr GBT and the like.
In this respect I miss a multiboot Stick (which works) for several Images and isos.

After having sorted this out, and using the regular Install of the netinstall iso I arrive at the same result

from my post up there

/var/cache/apt is missing again.
However I copied the syslog and will bring it here, once  I open the box and move the /dev/sda to this thing I am using right now.

There must be a difference if it must work on bare metal of 2008.

I have noticed that 1G ram in qemu is not enough to boot an installed system if the root partition is encrypted. But in those cases, the installation completed normally - just *can't* reboot into it.

Edit: can't, can not, it hangs.

cat /proc/meminfo > meminfo 
more meminfo

Lolwut?

pager /proc/meminfo

So press <ctrl>+<alt>+F4 to read them (or just <alt>+F4 if you're using the non-graphical installer).

Does that fit your use case?

cat /proc/meminfo > meminfo 
more meminfo

it is possible to see the memory needs.
only because of this
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=35494#p35494

There is still plenty of 600,000kByte in RAM available(free)

However /var/cache/apt is not generated when going to the step of install base system

edit 6:56 CEST
There is a directory /var/cache/anna, which seems to be the replacement for apt , but then

package: anna
Version: 1.83+devuan1
Installed-Size: 166
Maintainer: Ralph Ronnquist <ralph.ronnquist@gmail.com>
Architecture: amd64
Depends: libc6-udeb (>= 2.31), libdebconfclient0-udeb (>= 0.260), libdebian-installer4-udeb (>= 0.121), cdebconf-udeb
Origin: Devuan
Description: anna's not nearly apt, but for the Debian installer, it will do
Description-md5: 39239def5f89c730ca582effecd5256a
Section: debian-installer
Priority: standard
Filename: pool/DEVUAN/main/a/anna/anna_1.83+devuan1_amd64.udeb
Size: 44792
SHA256: 0dae2686092c53e324f3cf0c0fefd9d6e20fb8261edd17369aabc8ee9198e64f

bug or feature, spent now 2 days fighting with this installer

edit 7:10 CEST
Who takes carte of the devuan installer ?     @ralph.ronnquist?

there is no top and the ps of busybox has no options. so I cannot see how much RAM is in use.

cat /proc/meminfo

EDIT: check TTY4 for full error messages.

I had the same
Warnung : Failure trying to run : chroot "/target" dpkg --force-depends --install /var/cache/apt/archives/base-passwd.3.5.51_amd64.deb

/var/cache/apt/ directory is completely missing !

It seems, that the RAM of 1GB (-videoram) is not sufficient to install a devuan server, also it could once be done as an upgrade from the debian history

there is no top and the ps of busybox has no options. so I cannot see how much RAM is in use.

silently fails the installer without telling the true reason, why the install must fail

FWIW,  i used denyhosts in the past, which is similar to fail2ban. I found it to be useless because every break-in attempt now comes from a different IP address. Using non-standard ports is pretty useless too, because Censys publishes their port scans on everyone, so you only have to look it up on the web to find what ports are open on any address.

I decided to make a fresh install.
tried to make a fresh install now using the chimaera netinstall in expert mode. Release_notes_chimaera_4.0.0.md from Di 12 Okt 2021 12:48:01 CEST
this install fails repeatedly with a debootstrap error failing to chroot to "target/"  .... also in install mode.

HW is this old Intel atom described here https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=4693

iso written with dd to the usb stick