A rather belated update.

Good times, bad times ...
Edie Brikell comes to mind.

Finally got my new fibre link installed so I went ahead with that.
Worked prefectly well.

Thank you very much.

Best,

A.

@czeekaj

Had a look, will put it into the list of possible replacements.

@pcalvert

No, not yet.

The thing is that I am still on the fence as to whether to go through with the Beowulf -> Chimaera, among other things because I am not sure I want to suffer the new version of xfce4, more so with the upgrade itself being rather problematic.

I think I'll wait this transition out for a while longer.

Thank you both for your input, much appreciated.  8^)

Best,

A.

https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?pid=48061#p48061

If not, now would be a good time to do so.

For wireless I'd use this. It would be pretty hard to break like wicd does with python 2 getting marked as depreciated. much like the old obmenu needing python 3.7. You can still install old dependencies from beowulf but again it probably got removed for a reason in newer releases.

Yes, I remember.
Thanks for that. 8^)

But now the problem at hand is first being able to make a painless move from Beowulf to Chimaera.
Incredibly enough, there were no issues with wine, my MS based Pegasus Mail email client or the unsupported legacy Nvidia 340.108 drivers.

Upgrading to Daedalus is not in my sights at this moment.
Whatever for?   <- which remains an unanswered question somewhere in my OP.

My WiCD setup/configuration did not survive the upgrade, probably due to (surprise, surprise!) xfce4.

I use WiCD to switch on/off my eth0 connection with just a click as well as being able to get up and running (via my friendly neighbour's WiFi) in under 5' should something happen with my ADSL line, the router or the braindead AHs who run the local telco improvement and modernising departments.
So, at least for me, it is not just for WiFi.

I may have to switch to MATE or directly to Openbox but the lack of an easy to use configuration tool is a bit of an issue for me.

I seem to recall (?) that there was a script (somewhere) which would generate a #! type desktop without much ado.
Can't remember now, maybe it was related to something Hoas wrote up.

Thanks for your input.

Best,

A.

Wicd was removed from Debian Bullseye as it requires python 2.

File INSTALL from wicd-1.7.4.tar.gz

I have already demonstrated to you what wicd works in Dedaulus.

P.S.But regarding the "bloated" networkmanager.
Wicd can only control one account  Wi-Fi, NM capabilities are available.

Hmm ...
Not really.
Have a look here.

That is a WiCD package only by name.
It is a transitional package that works as a front end to install any one of its listed dependencies:
ie: network-manager-gnome | network-manager | connman-gtk | cmst | connman-ui

From the README.Devuan file:

* underline is mine.

Thanks for your input.

Best,

A.

This is a follow up on this post.
More than anything to avoid excessive length and muddling up.

To make a first, quick test run, I booted up my box via a Daedalus 5.0 desktop-live *.iso and and generated an *.img file of my system drive.
That done, I restored that *.img file to an empty, larger drive sitting in one of the cage sleds.

That worked prefectly well, the restored image taking up its space leaving unallocated space untouched.
Being a test, I chanced using gnome disks which surprised me, but then this is a vintage/non-UEFI rig.

I then set up the BIOS to boot from the drive where the newly restored image was residing so that the system would not touch it.

Once I rebooted the box, I checked and found that everything was working as expected and nothing seemed to be amiss.
A bit slower as my system drive is a Samsung 120Gb SSD and this is just an older 300Gb SAS drive.

I then followed the instructions on this page at Dev1.
Clear and straightforward enough, as always/usual.

Being on a WiFi connection, the whole thing took around 45/60 minutes or so, didn't bother to time it.

But after rebooting I found that my xfce desktop settings had all gone south, the panels were empty and I no longer had WiFi access.
ie: I had no way (interface) of making the bloated POS network-manager work.

It seems that the xfce upgrade signifficanly screws up most if not all previous settings.
Why am I not at all surpridsed?

Eventually and after much trial and error, I managed to bring up a WiFi connection via command line to complete something that had not been updated/upgraded correctly.

But after rebooting even nmtui refused to connect to the very same WiFi I could instantly connect to with WiCD/Devuan Beowulf in my Asus 1000HE netbook. Yes, all credentials were correct and I have always been able to connected both machines to the router at the same time.

That said, I think that if I want to ge this right, the first thing I need to do is find a proper replacement for WiCD.
ie: one that works like WiCD, that I can bring up and use to connect to whatever I need/want to use (wired or wlan) without any hassle.

Just like I can do today with WiCD in Devuan Beowulf.
   
On the bright side of things, SLiM worked as expected, my screen setup worked as usual (nvidia drivers) and even wine brought up my email client (Pegasus Mail) with no issues.

But xfce and network-manager absolutely screwed up, ruining the show.

I am now back to my original system drive thinking about what to do.

Any comments will be welcome.

Thanks in advance,

Best,

A.

BTW: writing up this post took me a while, as a result, the timeout no one else suffers from kicked in. Still don't know why or how this happens.