Sorry, i can't help here but i am a bit confused why libvirt would need knowledge about the installer layout. Why wouldn't it just setup a virtual CD drive and run the installer? It's full hardware virtualization after all. Qemu has no problem with the ISO as it obviously does not care what's on it as long as it's bootable.

Not sure but i'd try apt-get install xorg to be sure you have all the required packages. I have a feeling the guide assumes you already have a working x installation and our error suggests there are some missing.

I guess that's more related to XFCE than X itself then. I am running icewm with neither elogind or consolekit (obviously using xserver-xorg-legacy and needs_root_rights=yes) without problems here.

I guess the installer works with the assumption that whatever lvm/crypt volumes will be used by the installation will also be created by it and i very much agree that isn't optimal.

Yeah, your fears were probably quite well grounded. If they are actually present the only option i see is basically not partitioning anything at all and instead doing the mounting using the shell. Needless to say this really isn't optimal again and even if it works i don't think it'll be much fun.

Afaik the Devuan team has plans to build a new installer but before that happens i doubt much will change (just my opinion - i am not even on the dev team). Maybe there is someone who has the needed background, skill and time but at least for me it seemed easier to write my own installer from scratch than to attempt customizing the existing one. Funnily enough i am just sitting at the partition setup part. A 20kb+ and growing dialog powered shell script monster. I know it doesn't help you now but if i manage to finish this thing hacking in an "unlock - don't format" checkbox should be pretty much a 5 minute job.

Uhh, included by default where?

Right now i am using a Thinkpad X220 (i5-2520M with 4GB RAM) but i also have a Core2Duo desktop (2.7GHZ or something?) with again 4GB of RAM, some cheap shit TFT and a GForce 9800GT (likely not worth mentioning considering the age but oh well). The Core2Duo is sometimes showing it's age but aside from recent games (i hardly game anyways) and some ridiculously Javascript intensive websites it's perfectly fine for my usage. I'd really like to have a SSD for the laptop but it's more about saving battery and data safety than performance. I hardly do anything that's bound to disk I/O so HDDs won't bother me. I also use a custom desktop that would still run great on a Pentium3 (obviously a lot of applications wouldn't and compiling stuff would take ages but you get the idea) so i don't really need a lot of power anyways.

Sorry, i have zero experience with the live installer. Unless someone else can chime in i guess @fsmithred (this forum needs a tagging mod...) would be your best bet since afaik hes the author.

This is true. You could try with a statically linked lvm2/cryptsetup but it's a bit of a pain to build all the dependencies (i am toying with a custom installer on the side and building just a static cryptsetup is no fun and lvm likely is not much nicer). Not sure if this would solve the problem but trying is free (besides time). If you are interested i can post the part of my buildscript concerning cryptsetup. It also builds libdevmapper which is part of lvm2 so maybe you could get something running without to many adjustments.

Edit: Since the installer handles encryption/LVM are you sure there are no cryptsetup/LVM binaries when it runs the partition setup?

I see. If the above doesn't help the only idea i have is trying to work around it by setting the mount of the home partition post install. If can life without LVM for root the only downside would be that you have to unlock 2 partitions at boot.

Sadly i don't think that's possible.

Sorry, i have zero experience with beowulf but for a start does the card show up in lspci (i guess it's a PCI card?) and aplay -l. I know the ALSA output doesn't say all that much since KDE likely uses pulseaudio but i have no experience with this again.

Edit: Is firmware-linux and firmware-linux-nonfree installed?

By default yes. Not sure if there is an option in the partition menu where you can unselect it. Iirc it won't touch unused partitions though. The textmode installer is virtually identical to Debian if that helps.

Edit: Thinking about it if theres an existing filesystem you might have to explicitly tell it to format (should be in the menu with the options for the partition) or maybe you will be asked about it. If you delete the existing partitions and create new ones they'll be formated for sure though.

I usually skip lvm and just do encrypted raid but the normal (non-live) textmode installer should be able to do that.

Edit: I am bit surprised the graphical installer would not let you switch to a shell (on VT4/VT5 iirc?) but then i never use it so i guess it's possible that wont work there.