I have noticed that there are othe posts realated to the sound issues. However, I am not sure if mine is related to any of the.

In fact there were two problems. The quirky one was about a pin on the hardware interface, related to speakers, not being activated.The problem is solved with help of ChatGPT, and, to be honest, I don't really understand how and why it works,because it is very much hardware related. The sound device I am using is:

Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH Azalia Controller (rev 01)

It is Realtek chip, far as I can understand. Rather common sound hardware. It works fine with Slackware on the other partition. The solution which worked was to add the following to /etc/rc.local I have modified the script a bit

(
SDEV="/dev/snd/hwC0D0"
sleep 5 
if [ -e $SDEV ]
then
   hda-verb $SDEV 0x15 SET_PIN_WIDGET_CONTROL 0x40
else
   echo "$DEV not found"
fi 
alsactl restore
) & 

'hda-verb' line is the key. I wish I understand the problem better, but I don't. I hope it might help somebody else with similar issue. Also, I should say that Excalibur was installed from single 'server' CD image (around 650M).Perhaps the installation from some larger image solves the problem somehow.

The second problem is trivial compared to the first one. I have two sound device on the system. The other is HDMI device in the NVIDIA card. It works with speakers attached to the monitor, which I don't have.  So I blacklisted the device :

blacklist snd_hda_codec_hdmi

Also the initrd needs to be updated with update-initramfs. This second issue might be trivial, but till someone might lose hours getting around it.

Either way, the sound works now.

I have an older PC with NVidia GT 1030 card.  I am running Slackware 15 and Windows on the same machine. Recently installed Devuan 5 64 bit on empty partition and setup multi-boot.

There seems to be a problem with nouveau  driver. System starts and I am getting lightdm prompt. However, resolution is limited to 1024x768. Also, I am unable to switch to virtual consoles (like Alt+Ctrl+F2). There is a blank screen with cursor when I try that. Also noticed that during booting the screen output stops after line "Waiting udevd to be populated".

Blacklisting nouveau solved the problem with consoles and I am now seeing all of the output during boot. However, I am still limited to 1024x768.

So I tried proprietary driver. The problem is that installer can't find kernel source. I installed linux-source and linux-headers- amd64-[version], where [version] was kernel version as reported by uname -r. No dice.

I must say that I am not a Debian man, but rather a Slackware man. I do have some experience maintaining existing Debian server on my previous job, but nothing like hardware or multimedia. Also, far as I can say, non-free repositories are enabled, but NVidia drive does not show.

So, I am trying to get familiar with Devuan. I'd like to know both, if there is a way to fix nouveau and what do I need to compile proprietary driver.  Thanks.