Resolved.

LAST HURRAH BEFORE I GIVE UP TILL NEXT EDITION

     i HAVE TRIED EVERY SUGGESTION YOU all have given me so kindly, and still i cannot raise a deskop GUI.

     HAVE MADE NINE DIFFERENT INSTALLS to whittle down the guilty parties here, stil; to no avail.

     Someone suggested i install mc straigt away to be able to maneuver, but when i gtet to the xorg.log.0 it wiull not open.

    The Following have been suggested to me over the last couple of months ( to no avail ):

    ( you know what, i am not going to recite again all the suggetions. .  they are many and if you are reading this you mnay well have contributed )

Suffice it to say that  am at a clean install with

        proprietary Non-Free -Devuan software ( mostly for nvidia issues ) -- when i inserted nomodeset=0 to the bootloader it actually gave me a glimpse of a lightdm ( mnaybe ? ) login but all huge images which told me i needed to use the nvidia option -- but i was never able to repeat the cycle.

        only one user with sudo priveleges ( no logging in  for root ) so as not to confuse  permissions and privileges

        only the default desktop chosen at install ( Xfce )

        only the standard utilities

        no server

        xorg IS THERE but server not available. Cannot be reached.

        with the following all listed as present  and functioning
       ( after requesting installs at the login to see if they are there already - and in every case they were there already )

            seatd

            slim  ( default for Xfce )

            xorg

            xserver

            startx introduced in every comination possible

        And no matter what i try, the Xserver is in error -- not available.

            segmentation fault

        I spent hours again today just searching apt to find out what was there and what was not, ' by installing them
        [ mostly they just give me back  a short summary that the curent one is the most recent one available, and no further installing to do ].

        and then trying to coax a DE from this

            sudo task-xfce-desktop

            sudo taxsel xfce-desktop

            sudo slim task-xfce-desktop

            sudo slim taskel xfce-desktop

PLEASE do not tell me to  just wait till Excalibur in hopes that this startx and Xorg Server -fantasy stuff is resolved.
[ a fair portion of the issues in this forum relate to x xorg startx, and yet none of their advice helped me  specifically ].

AND SO. ..

What I am needing from ANY of you is what i am supposed to do precisely after tty login to do so.

I feel like i have suffered enough in about 10 total days' effort over the last couple of months , researching  and questioning.  I need someone to be kind enough to just give me the real answer for CLI to successfully start a desktop in Devuan.

Surely I am missing something essential. , but so obvious to you all that You don't even consider it comlicated enough to consider.  I should already know.   But I do not.  I am that stupid.

I do not want to give up on Devuan. I want it to be my server and main squeeze.  But this is not sustainable.  I am out of suggestions.

I am writing now from NixOS but also have used in just the past 3 years  have installed

Redcore ( gentoo )
Q4os
wifislax ( slackware )
Kali
Parrot
Kodachi
Artix (no Sysd Arch )
MX
Xenwalk  ( slackware)
Manjaro
Mageia

and 15 other generic Linux OS

and have never ONCE had an issue like this one with Devuan.

Puppy Linux derivatives for some reason i cannot get the "LAY-IT-IN" copy nistall to work.  Ironic huh. ..

[ BTW  4-0 Chimaera was no problem either.  It only occurred installing Daedalus 5.01 with A free-floating  startx unbound and The Libraries dovetailing into Debian ]  .. Coincidence ??

NOT FOR NOTHIN, BUT , , , installs should INCLUDE options for Auto-Login at the beginning.

You must understand i would have dropped this months ago if you had just been another testing install.  But it is not.  I truly want to make Devuan the server i can focus upon. I believe your system approach is almost perfect in its conception.  How ironic.

any help is appreciated.

Andrew

Aluma  .  thank you.. .. 

I tried to do it through m c but could never get it to open.   

But the problem is that there is a problem to begin with. This should be garden-variety to resolve.

sorry i hit enter accidentally. \

So Daedalus does not automatically log in at all any more ? I saw no option to make it auto-loign during install. If it was there i missed it.

sp what dp o meed to do specifically,. when logged in at tty ?

Please spell it out for me letter by letter and word for word the set of commands i must excecute get ANY D E running .

THANKS, Ralph . .  BRB

When DuckDuckGo first launched ( i nave no  idea how long ago ) I tried it just like all the other ethical search service, donating a hundredth-of-a-cent for each search -- ANYTHING to get away from Google.  But i gotta say that when I am up against the wall, i will use google.  Once a month. 99% of the time I get BETTER, CLEANER, DEEPER, MORE LOGICAL returns from DucK.  . why ?? because, for me anyway, i suffered through their growing pains, gave all my results to them to improve . . and by god, after a  few years they turned a corner.   What matters here - to me - is that we are graced with a plethora of options in our technological lives, and if one wants to feed the gorilla then don't complain  when he takes your lunch.

Alex Kemp - thank you. That is all i ever need  is an example and i am off to the races  . .  for everything now, not just firefox.  This obviously is a methodology that will work with all the hidden corners of Devuan.  Synaptic just doesn't cover the optional stuff.
Many thanks.

Stop Ai  -  I love your moniker. . . I know   what you mean. I have always noticed a snappy ESR and a sometimes lag in the others. but to be fair i have used both the regular Firefox and the nightly for about 20 years now and they have a lot of baggage to account for. But I am happy to not be so quick on the draw as a tradeoff for having all my extensions ( 35 of them ) and bookmarks just there at all times.   I am a folder freak.

Interesting what you say about Wayland and sway on ESR.  But ESR has never had as much flexibility under the hood. So are you saying that in Daedalus it is still a problem ?  I have had no problem in  Chimaera.  which is where i am stuck until Daedalus resolves stupid stuff around D E not launching at tty7on fresh install.

As far as Wayland, yeah  . . . it took 10 years for me to finally give up on Kali and Manjaro for that same reason. Sysd and Wayland never cut the mustard and Compositor was always an issue that nev. was always re-installing after some random break that built up over time.  but part of that was KDE driven issues. I find  LXQt  much better and that is my Devuan default these days with KDE 2nd.   Xfce and Mate really just don't cut it because they are going the Gnome-bias way and i really think it is time for Cannonical to just take Gnome over.  or Fedora- RedHat.   Nuff said.  I am happy to have less snappiness in exchange for pleasing graphics, etc of the QT KDE variety. Love KDE cosmetics, and their suite of mainstay software gets better all the Time.

I must admit i am also a huge Thunderbird user.   Actually backs up 12 different emails with relative grace.

But i was also on earthlink  dial-up with Navigator  on Windows in the 90's -- always felt there had to be a bertter way than Windows.

And everyone here who contributes to the body of  Linux knowledge proves it every day.

Thanks again.

A

I would imagine that this release info is relevant in some way - but why has no one else had an issue over this like i have ?
And since Devuan now incorporateswhatever relevant repos from Debian 12 then now there are involved, there might be a chance for some screw-up in the translation, BUT
No one else is having this problem ( at least that has not been resolved ):
------------------------------------

- Introduction
- New in this Release
     + Rootless startx uses libseat1
     + Sway (wayland) GUI without elogind

xserver-xorg-core now uses libseat1 to control rootless startx and access to
input and video devices. This has several advantages, the most significant being
that it removes the dbus dependency from xserver-xorg-core.

libseat1 can use either seatd or elogind as a
backend. If you need to override the default choice (autodiscovery), use the
LIBSEAT_BACKEND environment variable.

If you are using seatd as the backend, ensure the user is a member of the video group.

This is only relevant to running startx as a user, xorg run as root by a display
manager is unaffected.

### Wayland GUI without elogind

Users can now enjoy a wayland desktop without elogind by installing
libpam-ck-connector, sway and seatd.

Ensure the relevant user is a member of the `video` group and run sway from
the terminal.
. . . . . .. . . .

OH yes and tasksel shows a pop-up selector but does not execute anything - no response from the mouse-click.

Nahkhiirmees  so what you are saying is that i should just AVOID Startx yes ?

GlenW  comments:
I AM able to see entire entries on my big monitor. 

When you do get to a tty, have you seen any errors about seatd? Because I found with a clean install seatd was not installed and the sddm would fail to show up and startx would not work either.

Once I installed seatd everything worked again. This was with kde/plasma desktop.

One other thing that may help... add console=tty12 to your grub line... I also add vga=794 to make the font smaller in-case the video module hasn't started, just makes it readable, for me. And may give more clues when it won't start properly.
----------------------------------

## No such error but i called it up and it was not installed so i installed it and system seemed to like it and IT DID advance the boot to a clean login position instead of having to fight through  paragraphs, so THANK YOU Glen . . 

## Here  are my notes on the more-obvious anomalies --  from phone pic of visible text at rest awaiting login:

/run/lock : creating directory
/run/lock : correcting owner    ( but later on at the end it remarks about being locked out of some access and failure to locate server [ which i will reference below ]
er,bin (-2)
     nouveau firmware failed to load nvidia drivers  ( but i see this often  across other OS )
        firmware : failed to load  i915/kbl_dmc_ver1.04
       nouveau : DRM: failed to create kernel channel, -22

## ALSA  warning runtime restore failed with errors

## Setting up  X  socket  directories seemed to be ok in temp files

## Seatd started
## slim started

## AFTER I introduced seatd then X proceeded  to login   [ Small victories , GlenW ]

E:  Could not open olock file  /var/lib/dpkg/lock-fronted - open ( 13: permission denied )
E:  Unable to acquire the dkg fronted lock ( var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend),   ( are you root )

## When i run in root it still does not .. just x-sever error - besides cannot boot and stay in root - that is a big no no right ?

Still cannot access a desktop  in root either