Nice work, Altoid. No, there's no point in continuing. At least their last statement is more accurate than the earlier one.

There must be something wrong with whatever generates that list. There's no systemd package in devuan.

root@ceres:/# apt policy systemd
systemd:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: (none)
  Version table:

Same as the rest of the banned packages.
https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/bannedpackages.txt

One way to get into this situation would be to rsync /DATA to /media/storage/ when nothing is mounted at /media/storage. Then when you do mount something there, it will hide /media/storage/DATA.

To fix it, you could get fancy with overlay mounts so that DATA did not get covered, but moving it out as already suggested is a much better idea.

'locate' shows you what it found the last time updatedb ran, which might be different from what files exist now. updatedb usually runs once a day.

Good call, Camtaf. If you need non-free wireless firmware, add "non-free-firmware" instead of "non-free" to sources.list.

I'm not sure what's in non-free now that they moved the firmware.

Welcome back and congrats on the house! Nice to see you again. I'm in and out of here a lot. Internet here is as slow as yours is fast.

For 1, 2 and 3... what rolfie said. Or, if you have a beowulf install around, upgrading to chimaera is not bad (i.e. easier than ascii to beowulf) and chimaera to daedalus is even smoother. YMMV depending on desktop and whatever else you have installed.

See you around.

I wish to protest on behalf of the koalas. That was unbearable.

Two suggestions.

1. Press ctrl-alt-F7 to see if you can find your running desktop (or graphical login screen)
2. As root, run /etc/init.d/sddm restart and see if you get any useful messages. Try finding the desktop again, too. Maybe check all the vts (ctrl-alt-F1, F2, etc.)

I see it in the list of Recommended packages, but it's not in the list of packages to be installed, and I am not excluding Recommends. I'm testing on a daedalus desktop-live iso booted in qemu. Here's where those two Recommends come from. You cannot install them in devuan. You can proceed without excluding Recommends.

root@devuan:/home/devuan# apt rdepends systemd
<systemd>
root@devuan:/home/devuan# aptitude why systemd
i   ntp    Depends    ntpsec
i A ntpsec Recommends systemd | cron | cron-daemon
root@devuan:~# aptitude why systemd-coredump
i   task-xfce-desktop Recommends xfce4-goodies
i A xfce4-goodies     Depends    xfce4-notifyd | notification-daemon | notify-os
                                 d
p   plasma-workspace  Provides   notification-daemon
p   plasma-workspace  Depends    drkonqi (>= 5.27.5~)
p   drkonqi           Recommends systemd-coredump

The desktop-live isos only provide a single desktop, which includes everything you get when you install task-xfce-desktop. If you want a different desktop, it's probably better to use one of the installer isos. You can choose the desktop you want from the installer and get a fat installation with everything, or you can un-check the desktop stuff and start with a console-only system to add exactly what you want.

Instead of archiving the packages to install, you could just archive the installation itself with all the tools you need already installed and working. Install the system in a virtual machine made with open source tools and you have the entire system inside a single file that you can move around and keep in a safe place.

The use for encrypted persistence is so that nobody can steal your live-usb and read your personal files.

Using a usb to provide encryption keys for an installed system is a completely different but equally valid case.

I've done it with sshfs, either mounting a directory from the host on the VM or the other way, mounting a directory in the VM on the host.  The former can be done without any network options in the qemu command. You do need to have sshfs installed.

sshfs user@host-ip:/home/user/some-subdirectory  some-mountpoint-in-the-VM

fusermount -u some-mountpoint-in-the-VM   # to un-mount the share

I've done it with nfs, too. That's a little more involved. You can even set it up with autofs so the share mounts automatically when you access the mountpoint.