Then they might need to avoid metapackages that pull in things that might conflict with other things they want.

For better granularity in package selection, un-check everything at the tasksel window except maybe Standard System Utilities. You probably want those. Then add what you want after you reboot into the new system.

Use the option "--no-install-recommends" when you install packages. If that will exclude something you want, then add that package to your list of things to install. You can use "--simulate" with apt-get apt or aptitude to check what will happen before you actually do it.

Here's a list of what task-console-productivity pulls in.

apt show task-console-productivity
<snip>
Recommends: dialog, zsh, entr, gddrescue, gdisk, htop, iftop, iotop, iw, mtr-tiny, multitail, ncdu, parted, pciutils, psmisc, sudo, time, wavemon, wireless-tools, wpasupplicant, ed, zile, bind9-host, bittornado, curl, dnsutils, edbrowse, fetchmail, ftp, geoip-bin, irssi, lftp, links2, lrzsz, mcabber, minicom, mosh, msmtp, mutt, netcat, net-tools, nfacct, nrss, openssh-client, openssh-server, procmail, rsync, telnet, tin, traceroute, w3m, wget, whois, abook, apcalc, aspell, aspell-en, calcurse, clex, dvtm, fbi, fbterm, ghostscript, gnupg, gnupg2, gnupg-agent, mc, parallel, poppler-utils, rpl, rename, sc, screen, taskwarrior, tmux, bastet, bombardier, bsdgames, cavezofphear, crawl, curseofwar, empire, freesweep, gnuchess, greed, matanza, moria, nethack-console, ninvaders, omega-rpg, pacman4console, pente, sudoku, beep, brltty, espeak, espeakup, yasr, alsa-utils, caca-utils, hasciicam, imagemagick, jhead, moc, radio, sox, cmatrix, cowsay, eject, figlet, fortunes-min, fortune-mod, gpm, man-db, manpages, manpages-dev, mlocate, termsaver, toilet, toilet-fonts, ttyrec, unzip

'apt show luit' give me this:

Breaks: x11-utils (<< 7.7+6)
Replaces: x11-utils (<< 7.7+6)

which suggests that luit might work with newer x11-utils than what is in ceres/daedalus (7.7+5) so maybe you can't have both luit and xorg or maybe a newer xorg is coming at the last hour before bookworm release. Have you looked for any debian bug reports about this? That might tell you if they have plans to fix it.

One way to do it would be to install the second system without installing a bootloader and then run 'update-grub' in the first system. The new installation will be added (if os-prober is installed and enabled in /etc/default/grub).

If you want the second system to be the one in charge of booting, you can give it a different name. Boot into second system and run

grub-install --bootloader-id=somecoolname
update-grub

and then the boot files will be in /boot/efi/EFI/somecoolname

Edit: If your computer's uefi works like mine, the new one will be set to boot first.
And, if your computer's uefi works the way it's supposed to work, you'll also be able to change the boot order with efibootmgr.

This looks like what I get on one laptop when I run the debian/devuan installer. You might be able to specify a screen resolution at the boot screen. If you're booting uefi, you can edit the selected entry in the boot menu by pressing e and then adding a line before the linux line that says set gfxpayload=<some resolution that works> then press ctrl-x to boot.

If you're booting legacy bios, you get an isolinux boot menu and you can press TAB to edit the boot command and add vga=<some vga mode that works>

Maybe check what the screen resolution is when you're running the desktop-live system and use that.

I just installed faac from non-free and firmware-iwlwifi from non-free-firmware in daedalus without any errors.

Sometimes you get errors if you hit a mirror just when it's updating, and in those cases, it works again after a few minutes.

And sometimes a mirror is down. If it turns out that your sources.list is correct and you still have problems, you could select a specific mirror from this list: http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/mirror_list.txt
You can check the status of mirrors on this page: https://sledjhamr.org/apt-panopticon/re … t-web.html

FYI, you need to replace $OFFSET with a number, but I don't see the numbers you need from the fdisk command to calculate the offset. (sector size X first sector)

Here's a maintainers guide for forked packages. https://git.devuan.org/devuan/documenta … ngGuide.md

You'll get much more information in the debian documentation listed on that page.

If you're doing this to learn how to do packaging, you might want to start with some smaller and easier packages.

Y'all might be pleased to learn that the default xfce desktop install in daedalus does not pull in xscreensaver.

I think you need to build it in a chroot that has the build deps installed. That can be done with pbuilder or fully manually or probably another way.

I passed your question up the chain to see if there's a different answer.

Encrypted or LVM installs with debian-installer can be confusing. Maybe this will help:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEl2S5MI-WU
Manual partitioning begins around 4:50

These scripts are in Refracta isos, but a debootstrap install only gives you packages from the repository. Any custom files you want must be copied to the chrooted system or added after you boot into the new system.

bind-mounts

#!/usr/bin/env bash

#set -x

if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
    echo "
  Name the directory/mountpoint you want to chroot.
  It should already be mounted.
  You need to be root.

  USAGE
  $0 <chroot_dir>
"
    exit 0
fi

chroot_dir="$1"

mount --bind /sys ${chroot_dir}/sys
mount --bind /proc ${chroot_dir}/proc
mount --bind /dev ${chroot_dir}/dev
mount --bind /dev/pts ${chroot_dir}/dev/pts

while true ; do
    echo "chroot $1 now?"
    read ans
    case "$ans" in
	[Yy]*)	chroot "$1"
		break ;;
	    *)	exit 0 ;;
    esac
done

exit 0

unbind-mounts

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# unbind-mounts

if [ -z "$1" ] ; then
    echo "
  Name the root directory/mountpoint 
  of the chroot you just exited.
  You need to be root.

  USAGE
  $0 <chroot_dir>
"
    exit 0
fi

mountpoint="$1"

umount "${mountpoint}"/dev/pts
umount "${mountpoint}"/dev
umount "${mountpoint}"/proc
umount "${mountpoint}"/sys

exit 0

In general, yes it's a bad idea to pull packages from another distro. MX and Devuan are both very close to pure Debian, so there's a good chance that their forked packages will work for us.

I did use d-i, but then I must have done something to break that system. It was just a test system in a VM. I tested again with a fresh install the next day, and I'm not able to reproduce the problem.