@shimarin, thanks.

The initial step of that installer is a dialog with a menu of 8 options plus 'help'. You want me to guess that you used option '1 Install' (that's ok) and I can probably likewise guess from your outline for the handful of dialogs following; in particular that in the task selection dialog you unticked everything except the bottom one for standard utilities.

Eventually reboot into the installed system, which presents the login prompt on vt1.

So what's next? Login as root or user? And perhaps you can include the output of

grep ^Commandline /var/log/apt/history.log | grep -n ''

up to the point where you first ran into the Xorg issue.

1. Install media. This would be the filename of the iso file that you used to install devuan from. Perhaps even the URL you used. If you have done "installed devuan" some other way than using an installation media, then you would need to descritbe that too. Only so that I can do the same.

2. When installing with the installer ISO it takes you through a series of dialogs. I was asking that you tell me what to do so I can get the same installation done.

3. The boot command line is found in /var/log/syslog as a line with the text "Kernel command line:" in. It would tell me the specific kernel arguments used when the system starts. Presumably you would have "the default" from your manner of installation, so this point is merely a way for me to be ensured that my test system from points 1 and 2 runs in the same way as yours.

So don't worry about point 3, but please make sure you are thorough about points 1 and 2.

Did you install xserver-xorg-video-* package(s)?

Who is running startx; root or non-root?

How did you install? Which desktop environment did you choose? How have you got so many packages from "unknown" (especially both the nouveau and nvidia modules)?

Ok. Remove the link /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 and run (as root)

# ldconfig

which usually does good things to the libraries. You might also need to set a new link (as root)

# ln -sTf /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6

to sort out that dangling one.

I would think this all has to do with system differences between bullseye and daedalus (bookworm), and yet it's peculiar that only expr brings a problem.

Peculiar. Try running

$ LD_DEBUG=all expr

which should dump a haystack of goodies from the ELF loader. At a glance the problem appears to be with the ELF loader but I would then have expected it to concern all programs.

The haystack should include lines like

     17051:     checking for version `GLIBC_2.34' in file /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 ...

. Those indicate the particular ABI versions that the program requires. The hope is that there is some clue for the problem towards the end of it.

@Fierelier: yes, the Devuan repository is an "on-the-fly merge" of Debian packages that uses the packages directly from Debian repositories (except for the "forked" packages). I.e., Devuan only maintains and builds forked packages, and relies on Debian doing that for the rest.

In essence Devuan is simply a re-indexing of which packages are included and where to download them; forked packages from Devuan and all other packages from Debian. Thus, if Debian stops maintaining and building i386 packages, Devuan will follow.

Yes, that's due to the infamous "usrmerge" nonsense of Debian... they are in the process of moving stuff from /bin into /usr/bin because they think that everyone has set up links like /bin -> /usr/bin... and more. Web searching will tell.

You could have used --merged-usr for debootstrap and it would have configured the root filesystem with those stupid-links.

To come to there afterwards involves some manual copying hands-on and in particular a serious quirk in order to change /lib/ to a link without losing sight of the elf loader (e.g. /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2).

Ok. I'm really not sure which efivars files (aka "variables") can be deleted so a to recover space, but at least the most important ones are "immutable" (see with lsattr). Perhaps there are a couple of unused boot options?

You should back them up before experimenting!

You'll need to mount the EFI partition on /boot/efi.

"the mail system at host april.topoi.pooq.com" has broken DNS.

Perhaps if you avoid removing libpulse-mainloop-glib0 it might not remove xfce4 and hopefully retain that which you will want to retain.

btw, such output you should rather wrap as "code" than "quote" which would have made a scrolling element instead of a full two pages with such "nothingness".