I'd try running a 'live' version of chimaera, & if it boots OK, install it.

It would probably boot up, but would not have CUDA installed. And installing CUDA needs a reboot, whihc loses any updates done to a live version. I'd have to try installing chimaera, install CUDA and see if it works with my GPU. Then reinstall ascii from backups if CUDA doesn't work on chimaera. Which is more work than I want to go to for what is probably a wild goose chase.

I nearly always have a separate /home partition, this makes replacing an O/S easy - the main times that I don't is when I'm using a really small drive, such as my 16GB M2 SSD, or a pendrive.

Yesterday* morning I have decided: (1st) keeping devuan/jessie on dev/sda3 BUT (2nd) apt dist-upgrade from devuan/ascii via devuan/beowulf to devuan/chimaera on /dev/sda1. As of now** this works (not) very well:

• 1. Update your system with current sources.list to the latest version. See release info for details.

• 2. Cange your /etc/apt/sources.list to the next release: e.g. s(ascii)(beowulf)

• 3. Do a

  apt update

  followed by an

  apt dist-upgrade

  You may consider autoremove and autoclean, too.

• 4. Important are the Release Notes! (Hard to link to each:-( The step from  s(beowulf)(chimaera) has to consider both exim and NetworkManager.

Ok. IMHO was the wicd much better useable then network-manager since devuan/jessie! I like wicd and and I use it. But devuan/chimaera has dropped support for wicd for the right reason (according to the release notes)!

My problem: a dist-upgrade from beowulf to chimaera works well, as an established connection from wicd exists. But after an autoremove there is no wicd anymore. And  a NetworkManager was unknown to the system …

As of this writing the machine has no network at all. But transfering the right package to local file system should help. I will fix this next week.

Update (So 02 Jul 2023 01:09:45 CEST)

That minimal sources.list works for me from beowulf to chimaera works (ascii to beowulf has to be shown):
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged/ chimaera-security non-free contrib main 
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged/ chimaera non-free contrib main   
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged/ chimaera-updates non-free contrib main   

-- guuml

*) Usually known as 2023-06-30
**) 01 Jul 2023 23:32:38

but it's a long way, reboots and dependency hell could arrise.

get a new source here and write it to a flash drive with dd

https://files.devuan.org/devuan_chimaer … esktop.iso

there are updates available for it after you've booted a couple of times.

It'll be much cleaner system as well, because many of the structural programs and libraries have evolved.

My 2c

It must be proposed-updates and so on...

I've got two DVDs from Linux Format with Devuan on them, an old one with ascii and a newer one with chimera. But for some reason the installer on the newer DVD won't work, it's probably not compatible with the rather old motherboard etc. So I've had to install ascii to get the system to boot up at all.

When I tried to update it I got errors because http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged doesn't contain ascii any more. I found the readme pointing me to http://archive.devuan.org/merged which gets a little further.

But that hasn't got ascii-updates:

root@rigel:~# apt update
Get:1 http://archive.devuan.org/merged ascii InRelease [29.4 kB]
Ign:2 http://archive.devuan.org/merged ascii-updates InRelease
Get:3 http://archive.devuan.org/merged ascii-security InRelease [29.8 kB]
Err:4 http://archive.devuan.org/merged ascii-updates Release  
  404  Not Found [IP: 88.198.100.113 80]
Get:5 http://archive.devuan.org/merged ascii/main amd64 Packages [7,193 kB]
Get:6 http://archive.devuan.org/merged ascii/main Translation-en [5,652 kB]
Get:7 http://archive.devuan.org/merged ascii/contrib amd64 Packages [50.8 kB]                                                                               
Get:8 http://archive.devuan.org/merged ascii/contrib Translation-en [45.9 kB]                                                                               
Get:9 http://archive.devuan.org/merged ascii/non-free amd64 Packages [78.8 kB]                                                                              
Get:10 http://archive.devuan.org/merged ascii/non-free Translation-en [79.3 kB]                                                                             
Get:11 http://archive.devuan.org/merged ascii-security/main amd64 Packages [741 kB]                                                                         
Get:12 http://archive.devuan.org/merged ascii-security/main Translation-en [382 kB]                                                                         
Get:13 http://archive.devuan.org/merged ascii-security/contrib amd64 Packages [1,776 B]                                                                     
Get:14 http://archive.devuan.org/merged ascii-security/contrib Translation-en [1,759 B]                                                                     
Get:15 http://archive.devuan.org/merged ascii-security/non-free amd64 Packages [14.1 kB]                                                                    
Get:16 http://archive.devuan.org/merged ascii-security/non-free Translation-en [21.2 kB]                                                                    
Reading package lists... Done                                                                                                                               
E: The repository 'http://archive.devuan.org/merged ascii-updates Release' does not have a Release file.
N: Updating from such a repository can't be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default.
N: See apt-secure(8) manpage for repository creation and user configuration details.

Is it worth trying to do a series of updates from ascii or should I try to do complete reinstall of a later release? If it's worth updating ascii should I just comment out ascii-updates in /etc/apt/sources.list ?