KDE/Plasma seems to keep reading a lot of stuff from disk on inital login, which may be holding up something that pipewire start-up needs.

Once it is all cached in RAM, a logout/login cycle avoids the reading from disk.

I have been using in .xsessionrc

/usr/bin/daemon --bind --respawn --pidfiles=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR --name=pipewire /usr/bin/pipewire
/usr/bin/daemon --bind --respawn --pidfiles=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR --name=pipewire-pulse /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse
/usr/bin/daemon --bind --respawn --pidfiles=$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR --name=pipewire-wireplumber /usr/bin/wireplumber

but sometimes I have to log out and log in again for the sound card to be recognised. The sound card is fine and I don't have to do anything more than logging out and in again, but it would be great if it worked every time.

What I needed to have in / was:

bin -> usr/bin
lib -> usr/lib
lib64 -> usr/lib64
sbin -> usr/sbin

After that, the base-files upgrade worked.

PS, on my i386 installation I had to use /usr/lib/klibc/bin/ln if the default ln program was unavailable while changing symbolic links.

Didn't attend this concert but have seen some of the artists live (includes Marty Friedman on guitar):

Linked Horizon - Luxendarc Kikou - based on the soundtrack of the game Bravely Default

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDrp0k-11lM

Also available on Amazon Prime with English subs.

It's helpful to know what is different in your dmesg output compared with booting before usrmerge.

I had enough "fun" with incrementally adding symbolic links from old locations within /bin /lib /sbin to where the new locations in /usr/bin /usr/lib and /usr/sbin as individula packages changed the location of their files and finally installing the usrmerge package after I had manually done all the work.

Unfortunately when there are a lot of changes in one hit, it is difficult to identify the specific changes/errors that broke things.

I keep writing letters to myself

Dear Me

now package base-files in Devuan unstable (13devuan4) requires package usrmerge.

Reverted in the latest update:

@GlennW If you haven't heard it, Terra Firma by Tommy and Phil Emmanuel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzHUF3o5ML8

Thanks @steve_v, one last thing - you should have mentioned that /usr/bin/daemon is in package daemon.

TDR rant:

changing where packages install files so that they end up in /usr/{bin|sbin|lib} can only be expected to happen one package at a time (or with packages that have dependencies on each other package's versions), so those packages should create symbolic links from /{bin|sbin|lib} if  directories /{bin|sbin|lib} themselves aren't symbolic links to /usr/{bin|sbin|lib}

So far, I've only noticed package acl "doing the right thing" by leaving symbolic links in /bin pointing to the new binaries in /usr/bin

I have finally moved anything in /bin that is not a symbolic link to /usr/bin to /usr/bin

Also, moved anything in /sbin that is not a symbolic link to /usr/sbin to /usr/sbin

WARNING ln, ls, mv are in /bin - if you don't already have copies of ls, ln and mv in /usr/bin you should probably copy the versions in /bin to /usr/bin before doing a move / link that involves mv, ls and ln.

Alternatively, just leave files from package coreutils in /bin.

The tactic that I used was to run a command like:

cd /bin
ls -lt|grep -v /usr/bin|more

to see files grouped by date of installation.

It turned out that many newly updated packages had the newer files in /bin but there were still files from the same packages in /usr/bin from older versions of the packages.

So what I needed to do was move the files from /bin to /usr/bin a few packages at a time, then create symbolic links from /bin to /usr/bin

To do this I ran:

cd /bin
ls -lt|grep -v /usr/bin|awk '{print $9}' > tmp.tmp

then manually edited tmp.tmp to just include the file/link names of the oldest few packages.

Then I ran the following to move the files/links to /usr/bin:

cat tmp.tmp|xargs -i mv {} /usr/bin

and the following to create symbolic links in the /bin/directory:

cat tmp.tmp|xargs -i ln -s /usr/bin/{} {}

This was repeated until all file/link names in /bin that weren't symbolic links to /usr/bin had been moved to /usr/bin and sybolic links from /bin to /usr/bin created.

I then did the same for /sbin:

cd /sbin
ls -lt|grep -v /usr/sbin|awk '{print $9}' > tmp.tmp

edit tmp.tmp manually to only include file/link names from a few packages at a time, then ran

cat tmp.tmp|xargs -i mv {} /usr/sbin

to move the files/links to /usr/sbin and

cat tmp.tmp|xargs -i ln -s /usr/sbin/{} {}

to create symbolic links from /sbin to /usr/sbin:

Again, this was repeated until all file/link names in /bin that weren't symbolic links to /usr/sbin had been moved to /usr/sbin and sybolic links from /bin to /usr/bin created.

I then re-ran:

update-initramfs -u -k $(uname -r)

to make sure that update-initramfs was using the latest installed packages.