Sorry for  the delay, as I have been busy handling the video again for the beowulf upgrade. The video card is GT440 1G from Nvidia and does not work properly without the Nvidia specific driver. That was a lot of trouble eight years ago when the machines were new, but the driver became a standard package from Debian, and now Devuan; it requires compilation of a kernel module each time there is a kernel upgrade. I didn't make any comment about inches (and as a Canadian I would prefer to use centimetres :-) The problem seems to depend on the screen aspect ratio, and showed up on one computer when its monitor gave up and was replaced with a newer one, having the wider 16x9 aspect ratio. The cables and connections are the standard that came with a usual desktop (tower) computer. I just got a new computer with Intel B360M on board graphics and it shows the same behaviour. The only problem is with the traditional X11 background, so-called grey but actually a checkerboard; all other graphics display perfectly. I suspect there is a problem with the X11 background, and maybe that is why they replaced it; it is no longer the default.

Congratulations to the good people who maintain Devuan. With just a little trepidation I did my upgrade on one machine which was using 917 packages. The whole upgrade process took less than an hour, and all that I had to deal with was the usual questions about keeping modified configuration files. It seems as if everything works properly ... except the graphics, but that is an Nvidea problem, and both my X11 log and the email report on the installation give explicit instructions on how to handle the problem. I have had a lot more fallout from distribution upgrades in the past.

As regards graphics, oddly I am in a no-man's-land as I have a new machine that will not work without the 4.19.0 kernel, and my older ones which are having trouble with Nvidea and the Beowulf upgrade. It keeps me busy, and confined to the house, which is not a bad idea these days.

Just did a test run on a virtual machine, and it repeated what happened previously adding the 4.19.0 kernel to an ascii system, namely installing apparmor. That gave me trouble with the previous 4.9.0 kernel, specifically handling locales. My quick check on what apparmor is leads me to conclude that I don't want it, and that furthermore it might get in the way of running one's system without any unnecessary impediments.

It seems to recommended for the 4.19.0 kernel, not a dependency, so I don't think dist-upgrade should be insisting on it. I moved to Devuan because I did not want to be told how I ought to do things.

A question on the upgrade notes. As I recall from previous upgrades on Debian, instructions are to do an upgrade before the dist-upgrade; presumably to upgrade packages that do not require reorganization and changes in dependencies. Is that not a good idea?

I did comment elsewhere on the fact that essentially all packages were upgraded when I made the changeover, and my recollection was that previously something like half of them were unchanged if regular checking had been done on upgrades with aptitude. I am normally upgrading packages weekly, and I had assumed this takes many of them to the level of the next release. In that case I thought the dist-upgrade dealt only with reorganized packages and changes in versions.

It is indeed the problem! Adding a line "needs_root_rights=yes" to Xwrapper.config fixes things so that user roger can start X11. I am pleased with this outcome, not just because an annoying problem has been solved, but because I understand the cause and it makes sense. The only difference between the machines running my script and one that wouldn't was the video card, and apparently that makes the decision about rights when the auto setting is used.

Thanks for the quick and helpful response Ralph.

Thanks very much. What I was missing was that one can control which parts of sources.list are used with entries in an
/etc/apt/preferences file, and that those preferences can be overridden by a -t flag to apt-get. Of course one also has to run apt-get update to get access to sections added to sources.list

I can now install selected items from the beowulf release into a system running ascii. In principle I am happy to stay with the current stable release, but I am planning for a possible problem with outdated device drivers installing Devuan onto a new computer. I have had problems like that before with ethernet and video. That was several releases ago, and Linux seems much better these days in being up to date with hardware.

My computer usage is mainly to do programming running compilers and making relatively simple graphics applications (by gaming standards) - so I am happy to stay with whatever the current stable release of Devuan is, and I also appreciate not having to be continually involved in upgrades.

So: I am running the 4.9.0-12 kernel, and my computers have a file

     /lib/modules/4.9.0-12-amd64/kernel/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/e1000e/e1000e.ko

The driver is definitely is there. My problem is that running netinst.iso on a new machine with the intel chipset does not find the ethernet card. I conclude the driver is not in netinst.iso and so my best course of action is to get debootstrap into the machine currently running Ubuntu and use the untar procedure described in instructions. That is probably preferable to using apt to install it, mixing it up with Ubuntu sources.

I'll report progress. It is probably useful to know that the Debian wiki for debootstrap describes the correct procedure for Devuan. I have done a quick check of a test installation of debootstrap on a Devuan virtual machine and it definitely has some Devuan specific features.

A follow-up to the above: web research indicates that my problem is likely that devuan_ascii_2.1_amd64_netinst.iso does not include a driver for the ethernet section of the Intel B360M-C motherboard used by Asus. The computer provided by the vendor does contain a working installation of Ubuntu, and a check with lsmod shows that a module e1000e is installed, as a component of the 4.15 kernel.

In one of my existing machines currently running Devuan, the e1000e module is present in /lib/modules so it would presumably be available after kernel installation. The problem is then to get the driver into the machine in which Devuan is to be installed, and it now seems that it would be a good idea to follow the advice I was given in my previous thread and use debootstrap to install Devuan in the new machine currently running Ubuntu. It seems an even better idea given that the machine has two hard drives (in preparation for using mdadm to set up RAID1). Devuan can presumably be installed on /dev/hdb, using debootstrap, without messing up the existing Ubuntu installation on /dev/sda; once Devuan is working, Ubuntu can be removed, and RAID1 set up.

It sounds like a fun project; precisely why I got into working with Linux.

Thanks. It does work indeed, and the re-installed lsb_release identifies the system as Devuan 2.1

It's one of those situations where apt-get works better than aptitude which can be confused on occasion. I think the problem was version 9.20161125 was identified as being higher than 4.1+devuan2 so aptitude saw no reason to upgrade. Once 9.20161125 was gone, aptitude found the correct version from the Devuan sources.

Thanks, I didn't know that command. But it gives me

Devuan
9

I suspect there is a remnant from Debian that should be removed.