These packages were all installed. I installed the midi apps and soundfonts. This did not remove the warning on missing soundfonts, but starting the mixer will not crash hydrogen anymore. For whatever reason. If i happen have a free moment, i'll check how to setup the midi stuff with hydrogen.

(But first of all i need to deal with the bad news that i will lose my home temporarily for about 1-2 months due to a larger water damage in the building of my appartment. )

Gives some insight into the situation - but the alternative packages still seem beowulf only. Which would be an option after reverting the switch to chimaera on the 2nd machine (which is stuck to the 2.6 kernel anyway) bot not for now. But many thanks.

Which will not help the users with the old machines. We actually need a(nother) update of the old libs. I also tried to compile the sources of brscan2 - but You have to be relatively deep in sane development to be able to do this (and i didn't have time, needed my scanner urgently to apply for Corona help).

The brscan sources look to me like incomplete sources of libsane utils with the actual driver libs provides as binary libs. So any sane developer should be able to integrate the latter into the new source stream and - if lucky - compile it with those libs or - less luckily - write a wrapper lib in order to match APIs.

I checked, apt-get full-upgrade did nothing additional, which means that the upgrade was complete.
On machine b) - a notebook - the problem disappeared after i deinstalled laptop-mode-tools. And with that, some other problems. On machine a) the problem also disappeared but i don't know why. I temporarily ran the box from its old disk which carries an i386-ASCII upgraded from Jessie installation. After reinserting the new drive with the Beowulf, the problem was gone.

This is a fairly old device, and i have installed it successfully many times... and it was working before the upgrade.

There is actually an easy workaround - i still have  my old ASCII installation on an older disk drive (which i replaced two days ago). But it does not feel good knowing it will not be upgradable.

has been installed.

I just did an upgrade to an old i386 machine (ASCII+backports) and installed xsane+cups there. I noticed that udev had been replaced by eudev. Same problem after the upgrade.

regarding the linux image: on another machine (notebook)  the proposed 4.9.18-06  kernel lead to an unbootable system unless i also installed linux-firmware-free. Which is not a dependency. But i'll give it a try

Today i gave it a try after upgrading to beowulf. Well, to make it short: it crashed.

reminds me of the shortest version of ancient Netscape 2 ...

#!/bin/sh

touch core
/bin/echo "Segmentation fault (core dumped)" >&2
exit -1

Back to the audio problem: on my systems (both beowulf as well as ascii) the browsers work directly on card0 - and they mix: chromium, palemoon, qupzilla, vlc

No additional config required. libpulse is pulled in by the dependencies and surely used (but vlc was a self made ALSA version without anything pulse).

The only thing that must be ensured if an additional high quality sound card is used: it must be assigned by the kernel as card0. Even if the onboard sound is disabled in BIOS (my desktop plays through a  mixing console attached through USB), additional cards are by default not mapped as card0.

(i could not check the behavior with multichannel devices).

Yes, that one.

Falkon is going to be integrated into KDE, and hence Qupzilla will die,  at least as a standalone browser.

There is a significant community outside the KDE/GNOME/XFCE folks, and these (or maybe especially these?) might be the main community for the smaller browser projects independent on any desktop.

Anyway, regardless if someone likes midori or not - it is part of debian and hence devuan. In a meanwhile old version. A reasonably well tested port might be a serious candidate for the backports, won't it?

But anyway, i think i'll try a build and check the sid patches before, as soon as i have the time.

Well, we all have our preferences. Here on my large ASCII desktop (64bit hardware with 32 bit OS) i am running qupzilla (pretty unstable...), chromium and palemoon more or less permanently and midori for specific tasks where i want to ensure that everything is cleared after the session (banking...).

In NetBSD/i386 midori is the only acceptable browser - native alternative is just an old and slow version of firefox... but anyway, midori is an interesting project i am following (and using) for quite a while. And midory 7 uses a much cleaner GUI that 0.5.11 ... so it would be really nice if there was at least a debian package..

On my very new notebook i (64bit ASCII) i tried Iridium, but failed due to a library version mismatch - the binary is made for Ubuntu.

So in conclusion, there seems to be the need of a free, not too feature overloaded web browser, ideally independent on any specific GUI environment.