Hi all,

A friend gave me an old Thinkpad T410, which was timely, because I had just promised another friend that I would help set him up with a laptop that had a CD-ROM drive - which this machine happens to have. I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to introduce him to Linux, and of course went to download and install Devuan, which is what I use myself (thank you very much!). But I balked at the full install ISO at over four gigs - which would eat up a substantial chunk of my monthly bandwidth allowance - so thought I'd give the "live" ISO a shot, which is only just over one gig.

<rant>
Ok, first of all, I have to get this off my chest: I was not impressed by the GUI installer the live ISO comes with. It was throwing up terminal windows and other GUI apps (gparted) left right & centre - some of them partly off screen, and fell over if anything happened to get out of sync. It presented me with some nearly unusable GUI widgets, like a drop-down containing every European TZ location (this should be a scroll-window), and the keyboard layout selection sends you on a circuitous journey just so you can tell it that yeah, the keyboard layout is the same as the (already chosen) locale. Many of the checkbox options are contradictory; for example I chose on one screen to disable the root account (btw - why does it say this is a bad idea!? It's a really good idea, and ought to be the default!) only to have the next ask me for a root password. There are two options for /home encryption & partitioning, and many other things which confused me. I had to go through the process a few times before I got it right, and there was a fair amount of swearing. And when I finally thought I'd done everything properly I rebooted to find /home still under rootfs and not encrypted on a separate partition as I had expected it to be. So I had to start over again. The text based installer is a breeze to use by comparison and far more elegant and user friendly. A simple "Install Devuan on this computer" option in the GRUB menu, which launches the text-mode setup, is all that's needed, no?
</rant>

So anyway, I persevered, and got the system partitioned and installed the way I thought I wanted, but then I ran into some issues, which is really why I came here:

1) I was surprised to see Pulseaudio installed, and then I remembered that's why I always go with the netinstall ISO. Though I have never quite managed to get all the right packages installed from there to get a 100% fully functioning and smooth desktop experience - there's always something not quite right, like "reboot" and "shut down" from the menu taking me to the Slim login screen rather than rebooting (some dbus issue, perhaps?), and missing some control panel functionality, like the menu editor. But that's ok, I'm fine with that, and happy to use the console for a lot of stuff. But I want my friend to have a positive first experience of Linux, with a complete desktop environment and simple controls, so I went for the pre-packaged environment this time. Hey ho, it's easy enough to `apt-get autoremove pulseaudio` and `apt-get install apulse volumeicon-alsa`, which works perfectly - except the hardware volume up/down/mute buttons don't work. TBH I don't think I tested them before removing pulseaudio, so I can't say if they were working or not, but they're defintely not working now. I can see that they generate the correct events with `acpi_listen`, but it seems nothing is listening to them? `lsmod` shows `thinkpad_acpi` is loaded, so that's not it.

2) I was also surprised to see it ask me for an encryption password at boot; I'm used to the encrypted /home being automagically decrypted and mounted at log-on using ecryptfs (including encrypted swap). This should offer enough security for most users I would say, to hinder identity theft in case the laptop is lost or stolen. In any case I can't give the machine to my friend like this; he'd hate having to remember and type two different passwords to turn on his computer - or even the same one twice. I also didn't like how the installer (seemingly) forced me to use a separate partition for /home if I wanted it encrypted. In my experience slicing up a small SSDs into partitions inevitably leads to one or the other outgrowing its space, while there may be plenty of free space left on another one. I would make an exception for swap, since it doesn't need to grow, and /boot because it doesn't need much space, but /root and /home need to be able to grow unrestricted in a shared volume imo. So I went back and reinstalled again, now without /home encryption. I would still like to set it up though, for the /home directory, but when I checked my notes I found that unfortunately I haven't written down how I achieved this on my own laptop. Perhaps someone here knows the steps?

3) Possibly related to issue #1, I cannot get the laptop to sleep when I close the lid. The "Fn+F4" key combination works, as does choosing "Suspend" from the shutdown menu, but the lid refuses to trigger it. Again, `acpi_listen` shows the proper events (e.g. button/lid LID close), but nothing is listening. Similar thing with the power button; I have set it to "Ask" when the power button is pressed, but nothing happens - and here `acpi_listen` shows no events. Any ideas? Perhaps relevant is that the screen brightness controls do work, and even trigger a nice notification popup.

Phew. Well done if you made it through all that - and apologies for the rant; sometimes you just have to let it out. I love devuan and want to show others what a great alternative it is, not only to Windows but to other Linux flavours, so I'm prepared to invest some time in getting it just right. But unfortunately I have run into these problems which I cannot figure out on my own, so I'm hoping someone here may have some advice!