Thankyou, I did copy over an existing inittab from a saved eee pc daedalus iso, this cured the 'no inittab' error, but then there is a 'no inittab.d' error.
Can't see inittab.d on any sysv system, so am stumped.
Is nobody worried that simply following the latest devuan migration instructions leads to a rather poorly system?

Debian 12.9 netinstall base.

Please post a copy of your

 /etc/inittab 

?

Looking at RBOS, kde plasma seems more complete than mate

I'd like to see this, trip down ubuntu memory lane

When Bookworm is stable and finit is finished, I'll stick it on some eee pc and let you know if it's noticeably faster.

.deb files are just archives, so anyone who wants to inspect the contents can just uncompress them and view the files

forgive me shunning scripting etc, but as an old time software tester, I like my boxes unopened

I assume it has a usb port? If so then you can have a small boot partition on the first disk, large partition the rest of it, and add another disk or two, put  them in raid for a much more useful nearly 2 or 3 GB
Raid0 is on my asus eee pc 2G surfs.

Is it still the case that you can complete a netinstall without internet? You won't have extra software and your sources will need attention but it will work and you can add software later.

I find gnome-keyring useful. Logging in automatically to desktop, gnome-keyring asks for login password when launching google-chrome. I like this because potential thieves can enjoy my music and video collection but not my online stuff, hopefully?

Back in March, decided to upgrade machine 2 to ssd, so first upgraded spare machine 1 to small ssd and started using machine 1, so machine 2 could be worked on.
Then there was an emergency, and all projects had to be boxed and shelved.
Last week the emergency finished, then this morning machine 1 had an unbooting grub.
So, back on machine 2, which wouldn't boot, but got it booting by installing lmde5 in a spare partition. 6 month old devuan beowulf booted off the new grub. Apt update resulted in EXPKEYSIG BB23C00C61FC752C Devuan Repository errors.

For a moment, I actually thought about just running it without updates until I got debian working again.
Decided against that, searched these lists. What luck, the keys expired just two days before I needed them!
The real risk here, is users not promptly applying security updates, and I was almost one of them.

apt-mark hold <package>

command line apt ignores synaptic locking.