THAT's a 5-star idea, thanks, almost as good as device-names used to be. I owe you a beer so I'll have one and  ask the bartender to say a mass for your soul :-)    Tempted to 'label' it /dev/sda3 just out of spite!

I like fsmithred's 'modular' approach since I don't really have the badwidth to deal with one-liners of more than two words (got the desease from Bush jr.)

'dpkg --get-selections'
'dpkg --clear-selections'
'dpkg --set-selections'

I have never used dkpg, so if I understand correctly, in the order

--get-selections  lists the actually installed operative package names, much as would Suse Yast's 'export' option.

--clear-selections  ..having a problem with this.  How do you mark for deinstallation on a list that is given only later (next)?

--set-selections executes the listed package-name according to the trailing mode-spec (one of install, hold, deinstall or purge).

Thank you all, I'm not getting the email alerts (or I missed the first and only one). Woud be nice if incorporated into Synaptic like Suse put it into Yast.

Thanks. I finally got the bugger after a 4th installation. The next to last one was a total writeoff!!!  Then I did one a bit differently by selecting 'targeted drivers' or words to that effect and THAT gave me resolution barely good enough to do either cLi or even GUI with synaptic to install the firmware-amd-graphics package.

too scared to mess with it and end up even deeper and even more brownish. I sent a note to AMD about it, I wonder what the previous versions of Devuan used, it was working fine beforee with the same card on a Crossfire-IV-Formula board instead of the MSI (I don't think the board makes any difference). Debian doesn't have the problem either.

https://imgur.com/x2A9zHw.png

I meant that in terms of the PulseAudio Volume GUI. it should not install unless Pulse is installed.  As far as ALSA, I might set one of my distros up to use it instead of Pulse but I have other sound issues to square away first.

After moving my stuff into a new case I can't get my Xonar-STX-III to make sound at all and I don't think it's an OS issue because with the only two bootable systems I have right now (Slackware and Devuan) it's the same situation. If I play a video then PA Volume Control shows the output in the slider but neither the Speaker nor the headset output can be heard.

I hope I haven't blown my card's output jacks in the move because this is a GREAT card with 1/4" and RCA jacks and I know of no replacement for it.
.

Thanks, that's a relief. I thought that AMD was either on proprietary driver or on nouveau (same as nvidia) so if I installed anything AMD it might then prevent nouveau from driving. I'm an ignorant moron, that's why I've had nothing but nvidias until now :-)

Thanks for the explain; so if I want to stay with nouveau then I shouldn't install it. Right now nouveau is driving my temporary nvidia card, I presume that when I change the AMD card nouveau will simply use its non-proprietary AMD driver?

stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mt:

I do that too, there was a time when I booted a different distro every day of the week and had several backlevels of each ready to be booted. I'm now down to 5 as I leave only Suse as a sole systemd system.

A clean install means a LOT of tweaking, like two weeks worth, which is why I asked. Suse lets you upgrade a version with the DVD of a more recent one (getting a same system up to par is called and upDATE not an upgrade).

So now that I have done a Daedalus clean install I cant' get on line to even start tweaking.

lspci
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 13b1:003e Linksys AE6000 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wireless Adapter [MediaTek MT7610U]
Bus 007 Device 004: ID 0bda:8179 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8188EUS 802.11n Wireless Network Adapter
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0bda:b812 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL88x2bu [AC1200 Techkey]

Those are the 3 USB wifi transceivers*, NetworkManager is running, but none of them work (using one of them in Slackware presently).

*
I use ONLY USB WiFi and only removable racked/backplane drives as they allow physical control and thus aren't the huge security hole that wired-in onboard versions are.

Edited addendum:
==============
I have no idea how but wifi just works. Maybe NetworkManager isn't automatically restarted after every config edit and so next day's reboot is what did it.

As for upgrading without having to retweak everything:

There are two things that are important to ME

1
my favorite apps and of course all those they pull in as depends

2
my desktop and my custom icons*

I keep my home folder (but not all my user folders) on a remote drive. I just moved my data to a new ssd and on that partition mounted under /0/data  is a UserMe folder hosting among others a Dev folder. This Dev folder is my actual Devuan UserMe home so in my Dev system /home/UserMe is a link to /0/data/UserMe/Dev.  This means that on a fresh install such as what I just did all I have to do is get /0/data mounted in fstab and drop a link in /home as above. As soon as I log in my old home is my new home just like that.

This comes in to make things easy when I need my apps installed, many already being installed as part of most distros' standard fare; some will need my icons edited back into their configs, I just go down both sidebar panels and the ones that won't launch are the ones that need to be reinstalled.

This was my old Dev DT and is already my new one EXACTLY the same as before, zero changes.

https://imgur.com/screenshot-x2A9zHw

All I have to do nwext is install a small group of apps that don't sjhow in Synaptic (that'll be another topic).

* custom icons such as NedIt in the lower left panel and kdiff3 to its left.

found it... invisible screen area left bottom