Well, I spoke too quickly.
After killing LXDE on tty7 and restatring it on tty11, I posted my message above saying solved.
When I got back to the CL on tty10 where I had executed 'srartx -- vt11 &' it seemed to be hung, a couple of carriage returns later I hit Crtl-c. This brought LXDE on ttty11 down and I couldn't get it back. I tried the same startx command that had worked before both as mike and as root. No joy. Thinking that since I had started editing my log on tty7, i quit that and exited the VT. Didn't help. As root '/etc/init.d/lightdm start', the LXDE executable. No joy, said started but didn't show. As root, '/etc/init.d/lightdm restart'. Same result. Running 'top' showed that Xorg was running but no display manager and no xterm. I killed Xorg and tried all the things I'd tried before, still no joy.
Thinking perhaps I'd have better luck if I shutdown Devuan and restarted.
In 5-6 tries Devuan failed to start to the point of being able to to login.
A couple of times it never even showed a screen but several times it got to the login screen but wouldn't accept key strokes so no login.
The times it booted messages flash by on the screen saying apparmor failed.
Some distributions have a chance durring boot to get into a simple console to try to repair a broken system.
Has Devuan such that I simply didn't see or am I remembering that from MS Windows?
I'm back in Debian for Raspberry PI now in order to post.
Looks like I'll likely have to reinstall Devuan.
Unless someone has a better idea.
Be well,
Mike

Steve_v,
You said, "I quite like dma."
I tried to install it but jno joy, doesn't show up in .../dplg/available.
Did you get dma as a Devuan package?

I'm not on that system now so can't post sources.list but think it correct.
Perhaps you would post here what's in yours.

Thanks,
Mike