Well "Devuan" is actually like a warehouse of software rather than a particular distribution so it all depends on which particular setup you want to have. The most recent "excalibur netinstall", which provides a range of distribution choices with the most recent software, will want at least 800 Mb RAM to run and would comfortably install most of its graphical desktop environments on an 8 Gb disk. Though, today one will want at least 20 Gb disk to be somewhat "future proof".

Almost all software is compiled for several architectures, including both 32-bit and 64 architectures. In debian parlance they have names like i386, amd64, armel, armhf, arm64, risc64, ppc64el etc.

The keyword is "Choice".

I'd guess your "I chose RUNIT" means to install some software, and your /etc/apt/sources.list nominates /media/cdrom as a repository (of cdrom type), which is one of the babies that came with the installation. If you remove that, or comment it out, in /etc/apt/sources.list your system (aka "it") will no longer ask for that repository.

Since the analog out put is on your card 1, you should create a file
/etc/alsa/conf.d/00-defaults.conf with the following line:

defaults.pcm.!card 1

That doesn't sound like an active mirror but I guess you looked carefully in devuan_excalibur/installer-iso/.
The mirrors are otherwise listed at https://www.devuan.org/get-devuan and if you find an inactive one you could "report" that eg as a "devuan-www" bug at https:///bugs.devuan.org.

Very peculiar opinions you are voicing there. Especially I would consider "GUI tool that makes configuring it for online use" being a quite oxymoronic phrase. It's kind of like saying: "but he is friendly to the kids". Of course, I voice my opinion here.

Bring up a terminal and use the command

pkill Xorg

(as the user that owns the Xorg process)

If you check with pgrep -a Xorg (on the host where it is running) you will se that it is started with the parameter -nolisten tcp which means precisely that, that the server doesn't listen for connections on its standard tcp port (well not on any port).

To run remotely the way you attempt to do it requires you to start Xorg without that parameter.

When you've figured out how to do that, you have passed "Xorg usage 101" I'll have a browse myself meanwhile, and we can have it as a race....

Yes, pulseaudio is quite "intrusive"; it installs itself as the default audio path handler into the ALSA configuration which makes it difficult to use together with alternatives or differently by different users or different use cases.

Similarly it seems mocp has a per-user configuration making it hard for a user to have it used differently in different use cases. And being server based, I guess it will be determined by the start-up use case for the server.

I actually had a different issue, namely that my analog output is on card 1, and I didn't have the default CTL device configured properly. So now, instead of solving it with apulse I have the following in my /etc/alsa/conf.d/00-defaults.conf

defaults.pcm.!card 1
defaults.ctl.!card 1

For you, the use case differentiator would be with the files /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.d/pulse.conf and/or /usr/share/alsa/pulse-alsa.conf, which define how pulseaudio hooks into ALSA. If those files are absent, then pure ALSA is in use, and with those files in place pulseaudio takes over the audio path (I don't remeber which is "the master").
And there is also /etc/alsa/conf.d/99-pulse.conf...

I don;t know what mocp does (not in the repo), but I would expect if you run it via apulse it'd be happy using pure ALSA.

Afaiui, I'd note that ALSA is the sound system the kernel implements for operating the sound card(s). All layers above that, including s.c. sound servers, typically just use the ALSA API with various forms of wrappings over it. I.e., ALSA is not an alternative but a more basic API level.

An addendum to answer 2:
a devuan repository is actually a kind of overlay where it provides all index files (the dists trees) but has only the forked packages in its pool tree. All other packages are set up to be accessed directly from debian's repositories. This is done by the index including a URI prefix of either DEVUAN or DEBIAN for the packages' filename attribute, so that the devuan server (and mirror) can distinguish and respond with redirect's for the DEBIAN packages. See https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/devuan_mir … hrough.txt for some more details on this.

Yes, the Depends: should only relate to ABI requirements and all else should be Recommeds: or Suggests:.

Though I see that your strawberry deb is not the one in the Devuan (Debian) repository. So whilst your method is good or indeed very good, its details differ from a Devuanite experience which at least will find pulseaudio promoted (demoted) into (indirect) Recommends.

Use the URL http://mirror.nyist.edu.cn/devuan/merged