Ah, so it won't work anyway... But just out of curiosity - do you think my problem is due to the old mesa driver or maybe systemd/sysvinit differences? The same approach worked with Buster, however I have no idea on what hardware.

Thank you.

As far as I can see, running

apt list -a --installed *something*

sddm and xserver are installed, but xinit is not...
The content of  /var/log/boot is:

(Nothing has been logged yet. If you're still seeing this message your current init system might not write bootup messages to the system console at all.)
Sat Jul 10 17:34:14 2021: [....] Activating swap...??7[ ok 8??done.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:14 2021: [....] Checking file systems...fsck from util-linux 2.33.1
Sat Jul 10 17:34:14 2021: fsck.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24)
Sat Jul 10 17:34:14 2021: /dev/nvme0n1p1: 382 files, 41850/125952 clusters
Sat Jul 10 17:34:14 2021: /dev/nvme0n1p6: clean, 20/13189120 files, 1105464/52735744 blocks
Sat Jul 10 17:34:14 2021: ??7[ ok 8??done.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:14 2021: [....] Cleaning up temporary files... /tmp??7[ ok 8??.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:14 2021: [....] Mounting local filesystems...??7[ ok 8??done.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:14 2021: [....] Activating swapfile swap...??7[ ok 8??done.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:14 2021: [....] Cleaning up temporary files...??7[ ok 8??.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:14 2021: [....] Starting: AppArmor[....] $Mounting securityfs on /sys/kernel/security??7[ ok 8??.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:14 2021: [....] Loading AppArmor profiles...??7[ ok 8??done.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:14 2021: ??7[ ok 8??.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:14 2021: [....] Starting Setting kernel variables: sysctl??7[ ok 8??.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:14 2021: [....] Configuring network interfaces...ifup: waiting for lock on /run/network/ifstate.eth0
Sat Jul 10 17:34:20 2021: ifup: interface eth0 already configured
Sat Jul 10 17:34:20 2021: ??7[ ok 8??done.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:20 2021: [....] Cleaning up temporary files...??7[ ok 8??.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:20 2021: [....] Setting up X socket directories... /tmp/.X11-unix /tmp/.ICE-unix??7[ ok 8??.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:20 2021: INIT: Entering runlevel: 2
Sat Jul 10 17:34:20 2021: [info] Using makefile-style concurrent boot in runlevel 2.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:20 2021: [....] Setting up console font and keymap...??7[ ok 8??done.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:20 2021: [....] Starting enhanced syslogd: rsyslogd??7[ ok 8??.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:20 2021: [....] Starting anac(h)ronistic cron: anacron deferred while on battery power??7[ ok 8??.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:20 2021: [....] Starting periodic command scheduler: cron??7[ ok 8??.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:20 2021: [....] Starting system message bus: dbus??7[ ok 8??.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:20 2021: [....] Starting Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Daemon: avahi-daemon??7[ ok 8??.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:20 2021: [....] Starting bluetooth: bluetoothd??7[ ok 8??.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:20 2021: [....] Starting session management daemon: elogind??7[ ok 8??.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:20 2021: [....] Starting network connection manager: NetworkManager??7[ ok 8??.
Sat Jul 10 17:34:21 2021: [....] Starting Init script for Simple Desktop Display Manager: sddm??7[ ok 8??.

Could it be due to the lack of the drivers' support for my hardware (it is i5 11th gen with Xe GPU)?
I also did not set a root password during installation.

Thank you.

Where do I look for this file? I do not see anything like this in the installation image. There is a package called tasksel however... I'm afraid I just do not understand what you mean, sorry.

My wild guess would be the script locks dpkg for itself... Anyway, I compiled it from the sources, seems to work.

Thank you for your time and effort!

P.S. I have found a reference to the same error (but one and only) on one of the Debian forums dated 2017.

Huh, it doesn't seem to work.
lsof /var/lib/dpkg/lock does not report anything, but:

~$ sudo rm /var/lib/dpkg/lock
~$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure fheroes2-pkg
fheroes2-pkg: dpkg database is locked. You may need to use command "sudo dpkg-reconfigure fheroes2-pkg".
fheroes2-pkg: Building and installation of package(s) [fheroes2] postponed till after next APT operation.

Hi,

I hate leaving business unfinished and that's why I'm back:-). I've finally managed to figure out what caused my problems and would like to share it, hoping that  someone might find it useful.

First, I tried to completely get rid of PA. Can you live without PA? Yes. Will you like it? Maybe, but not so sure. After removing PA I still have sound (which is good), but faced a bunch of problems and restrictions, that included:
1. Very low max volume. I have a Windows system on the same laptop, so I could compare all 3: Win, PA and ALSA. ALSA had that low volume that in several cases I had to use headphones. I tried to fix it introducing an additional pre-amplifier via special script and it kind of worked - the sound became louder, but there appeared irregular sound distortions, that DID NOT depend on volume. So I had to disable the pre-amp.
2. A bunch of smaller things, that still might be very important. For example, you one needs PA in order to share sound in ZOOM.

Having all that, I decided to take a closer look at what exactly caused the high CPU consumption by PA. With re-installed PA I noticed that it starts taking up more and more CPU right after I use reader view in FF. PA Audio Mixer / Playback shows 3 more text to speech streams, which very likely were the culprits. Since I do not use this feature (text-to-speech), I removed a speech-dispatcher package (and its dependences) + orca-gnome just in case :-). And it looks like this made a trick. No additional streams, rather low CPU consumption by PA (though not a complete zero...). Technically, it seems it was possible to block text to speech instead, but as you can see I chose the radical solution :-).

The bottom line is that if you work with sound (professionally, as larsH in the thread above), you probably have an additional hi-fi amplifier and ALSA volume problems are non-existent, while sound quality is reportedly higher (compared to PA). On the other hand, for an average day-to-day cheap laptop user like me PA removal makes life a bit worse (see the points above).

Thanks for your attention.

Some updates on "living without PA":

1. With ALSA controls only, the sound is very quiet now. Only with Master/Speaker/PCM close to 100% it is kind of OK. Yes, it was much louder with PA (and Win7) and no, there were no sound distortions.

2. For some reason Clementine began to consume 10-12% CPU while playing any .mp3/.ogg file. It used to be about 3-4% and this is the number I see now using preinstalled QuodLibet or VLC. Clementine was installed from Devuan repos, all graphics/equalizer are turned off (as it was before, did not change anything).

So as usually happens, if smth is better, smth will definitely get worse :-)

Any ideas?

Thank you.

Well, I thought it was binary - either on or off... looks like there is a third option :-)

Do you mean Devuan repos? Skype is definitely from MS repo and I do not remember if Clementine 1.31 I have comes from Devuan repos or not. The facts are that if I do not start them, I do not see any traces of PA in a task manager, but as soon as they are active, PA re-appears and consumes quite a lot (for a laptop at least). And these two are pretty basic and widely used apps I guess.
The FF I have is from the Devuan repo, so I'll check this out too.

Thank you.

Thanks Lars,

Maybe I missed something, but for some reason I do not have any sound with ALSA alone. What I did was:
1. Turned off PulseAudio autostart.
2. Added volumeicon autostart.
3. ALSA settings: automute was on, so I turned it off. Sound card/input and output channels are correctly selected and non of them are muted.
As a result, still no sound with ALSA alone.

Thank you.