I recently installed the preview edition of Daedalus on my laptop. All is now well - but I had a few problems along the way that I feel I should report. I know of no better place than here.  I hope that somebody wiser than I can pick the bones out of this and improve the net-install to make the process smoother and more idiot proof though I am not aware that I did anything wrong.

My laptop was originally set up to dual boot Chimaera and Windows on separate SSD partitions. Its an EFI system with AMD onboard graphics and Nvidia add-on graphics. I was finding that some programmes I wished to run were demanding more up to date support than Chimaera provided so I already had some bits from testing installed and this was making the system a mess but it was working adequately.  I decided to install Daedalus Preview onto a separate new partition which I set up before I started the install. I used "devuan_daedalus_5.0.preview-20230213_amd64_netinstall.iso" loaded onto a USB stick.

When installing, I told the installer to put Daedalus on the new empty partition. All seemed to go well with the install until I rebooted at the end. Grub came up - but only showed the new Daedalus, (missing the Chimaera and Windows options) and when I tried to run it it froze a few lines into the boot waiting for /dev to be fully populated. I gave it time! I tried the advanced boot option and that got further through the boot process but still froze before the end (about 4 seconds in?).

I solved the grub problem by using the rescue option on the install disc to reach the original Chimaera OS in rescue mode - doing a grub-mkconfig and then a grub-install. That let me back into Chimaera from where I managed to use a chroot to install the nvidia packages onto the Daedalus partition (that solved the first boot freeze) and then the AMD firmware which I believe was the cause of the second freeze. This gave me a working Daedalus. End of Panic.

This took a number of attempts over two days so much confusion and maybe missing vital steps from this report. I am not recommending these solutions but I now have clues for the next time.

Thank you for Devuan. I have used it for several years now and am generally very satisfied with it.

I am converting a Raspberry Pi Zero W from Raspbian to Devuan.

I downloaded devuan_chimaera_4.0.0_armel_rpi0.img.zip from the arm download page, checked the sha256 value (it was fine) and loaded it onto an SD card. I modified the "change this to Credentials.txt" file appropriately and booted the pi.

The attached hdmi monitor wakes up but only displays a plain black screen but no boot messages, no init messages and no login prompt.

I can ssh into the pi perfectly well.  Looking at the log files:-
    dmesg mentions a framefbuffer and a console but shows no errors. No mention of hdmi.
    boot(.log) shows no errors but no mention of hdmi.
    kern.log has mention of vc (videocore?) but mostly in relation to video capture. It also appears to reserve video memory. No mention of hdmi.

Going back to the raspbian SD card, everything works including the monitor so the hardware is ok.

Searching the forums, I see reference to /sys/devices/platform/drm/ - and a number of directories below that one of which has hdmi in the name. There is no drm directory in the pi's /sys/devices/platform directory. But it is not there on a Pi2 that I converted earlier - but that does not have a monitor plugged in. The suggestion was that it should be possible to read the edid for the monitor from that location.

I suspect that my pi does not know it has an hdmi connector or a monitor connected to it.

I also found a post saying that some firmware should be copied to /lib/firmware/brcm to solve this problem - but try as I might, I cannot find that post again, and it was not very specific about which firmware to copy.

Any help, suggestions or pointers welcome. Preferably, I would like to understand what is wrong - not just fix it.

Thank you