I have no idea about the audio problem. Does aplay -l show anything?

Console font can be changed with dpkg-reconfigure console-setup as root.

A1: alsa is installed, mocp can play audio files, and if you choose one of the access options to boot, the computer will talk to you the entire time it's on. I don't recommend using that unless you have vision problems.

A2: ifconfig eth0 down There's also a way to do it with the 'ip' command, but I haven't gotten around to learning that one yet.

The lines for devuan experimental won't work. It's not a merged repo, so it only contains devuan packages. Here they are for reference.

deb     http://deb.devuan.org/devuan experimental main
deb-src http://deb.devuan.org/devuan experimental main

You would need to add a line for debian experimental in your sources. Be careful with that. You're not going through the filter that keeps out banned backages (the ones that pull in systemd) so it's kinda like having unprotected sex with someone you know, but not very well.

Ordinarily, I'd say you should be on ceres to do this, but right now there's not much difference between chimaera and ceres. You could add a line for ceres and pin it to a lower priority. Then you would have access in case something newer showed up and you needed it.

After you edit your sources.list

apt update
apt -t experimental install <package>

You might want to add --simulate to the install command to see what it will do first.

Yeah, I see the problem. The installer selects gdisk if /sys/firmware/efi exists or if there are gpt disks found. If you don't know to pre-partition with cfdisk, you are understandably lost in the installer. I'll change it so both are available under any circumstances, and the user can decide which one to use.

The above quote was in reference to booting the CD on hardware.

A1: It means you created a FAT16 partition on that virtual disk. If it happened automatically, it had to be the netinstall iso, not the live iso.  Why is it mounted at /EFI? It's not going to do anything there. If it is a real efi partition, it does not need to be mounted to boot, only to install or update a bootloader. Is vbox set to boot uefi or bios? Does /sys/firmware/efi exit? (You've seen these questions before. Since we're talking about two different isos installed in two different places, please try to be clear about where we are.)

A2: You have to choose msdos or gpt when you partition a disk. Refractainstaller will let you use gdisk if you boot in uefi mode and cfdisk if you boot in legacy bios mode. As I said, the minimal-live iso will only boot in bios mode, so it should not have shown you gdisk. If you managed to boot that iso in uefi mode, please explain to me how you did it.

For a legacy bios boot, you don't need the efi partition. You just need a root partition for the operating system and grub-pc will put the bootloader in the mbr of the disk of your choice. If you use gpt with a bios boot, you need to have a special partition for the bootloader to put some additional code. The live installer will complain about this if you don't have it.

If the minimal-live CD booted on the macbook, then the mac is capable of booting in legacy bios (CSM) mode. There is no uefi bootloader in that iso. And I agree that it should have installed in virtualbox. I have installed previous versions of the minimal-live in previous versions of virtualbox, and the current isos are essentially the same as they were then.

If you choose expert install in the netinstall iso, you get a few more questions, and one of them lets you skip adding a bootloader. That would have avoided clobbering rEFInd.

I booted the first option in the minimal live. Choosing one of the toram or access options shouldn't change the outcome. I'm not sure about the no-probe option.

This one: devuan_beowulf_3.1.1_amd64_minimal-live.iso

In your virtualbox gui, go to System, Motherboard, Chipset. What does it say?

This is not really making sense to me.

This section starts with line 524. It should tell how many efi partitions are present. I don't understand the error message on that.

if [ "$esp_count" -eq 1 ] ; then
        esp_count=$(env LC_ALL=C fdisk -l | awk '/EFI System/ { print $0 }' | wc -l)
fi
if [ "$esp_count" -gt 1 ] ; then
        must_choose_esp="yes"
fi

The error messages about  'Unable to open /dev-sr0 read-write' and 'Can't have a partition outside the disk' make me think that it's trying to install grub to the wrong disk. (i.e. to the CDROM). Sometimes grub and the kernel don't agree on which disk is first. This might be one of those cases.

Lorenzo,

Thanks for the thorough reply. I'm ok with using the scripts in rcS.d - it works fine that way. I might play around with the more advanced configs later.

I was thinking ahead to the future. Sysvinit scripts are disappearing at an alarming rate, and I worry that they won't all land in the new orphan-sysvinit-scripts package.

If you are installing from the minimal-live, there will already be at least one ext2/3/4 filesystem on the virtual disk when you get to the grub-install stage.  What do fdisk and blkid show for the disk? What virtualization software are you using on the mac? Maybe it does something differently from what I expect.

There's no specific iso for macs, but the amd64 desktop-live has both the 32 and 64-bit bootloaders and is know to work on at least one old macbook pro. If you do in fact need the 32-bit bootloader, you will need to install the grub-efi-ia32 package in the live environment before you install the system. You can install it with apt if you have network, or you can install it with

dpkg -i /grub-efi-ia32*.deb

When you install the package, don't let it install the bootloader at that time. The live installer (Refracta Installer) will let you choose the efi partition if there are two or more.

Make sure you check if that's what you need with

cat /sys/firmware/efi/fw_platform_size

before you try the 32-bit bootloader.

I'm not sure that will be enough. You still need a way to make the machine boot from the usb drive. Google says hold down the option key at boot and then select the usb drive.

A netinstall from a 3.0 iso would give you 3.1 or actually a little newer than that since some packages have been upgraded since last week. Volume settings on my up-to-date mate don't get lost. I do keep losing the hardware setting. Analog Stereo Output keeps reverting to Analog Stereo Duplex.

I tried running 'alsactl store' before rebooting and 'alsactl restore' after reboot. It didn't save the hardware setting.

The desktop-live isos already have firmware-amd-graphics installed. Maybe the version from backports is needed. I don't have an easy way to test that right now. And debian wiki suggests that this is not the problem. (4.19 is new enough)