I would say: wrong approach.
1.) Do not use Beowulf, use Daedalus. Beowulf is too old for that hardware and no more maintained.
2.) Do not try i386, use amd64. i386 on a modern UEFI PC may not boot at all.

Forget about this FAT32 formatting of the USB stick, this is nonsense. What you show is basically correct, unfortunately just the i386 version. The iso is loaded onto the bare stick.

Get a Daedalus netinstall amd64 and write it to the stick the same way as the Beowulf version. When you boot from the stick use that entry in the boot menu that has the (U)EFI-Prefix.

Good luck

Wait until it comes back.

Wait a moment, you used deb.devuan.com. Thats not correct. Please use deb.devuan.org to ping.

On the other hand: this is my result:

~$ ping -c 1 deb.devuan.org
PING deb.rr.devuan.org (131.188.12.211) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from ftp.rrze.uni-erlangen.de (131.188.12.211): icmp_seq=1 ttl=52 time=32.9 ms

--- deb.rr.devuan.org ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 32.882/32.882/32.882/0.000 ms

~$ ping -c 1 deb.devuan.com
PING deb.devuan.com (199.59.243.227) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 199.59.243.227 (199.59.243.227): icmp_seq=1 ttl=248 time=14.8 ms

--- deb.devuan.com ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 14.752/14.752/14.752/0.000 ms

No loss on both.

You should blame it to your internet provider. They are filtering/blocking stuff they do not understand. Talk to them why you can't get even a ping to a software site.

Welcome Phil.

I think you are slightly off track, the server called deb.devuan.org just works fine. Just did an apt update on my Daedalus, it worked here in Germany via the Telekom network. I can also switch to the devuan.org web page via the link on the right hand corner at the top of this page.

There were various events like this in the past, typically apt update not working against deb.devuan.org. You may search this forum for posts about this issue.

None of them was a server failure. It always boiled down to DNS issues. Various approaches are possible: use another DNS, look for a close by suitable mirror via this page https://www.devuan.org/get-devuan, talk to your network provider ...

Good luck

You should have been trapped in any release including Beowulf and later. The only way around is a dedicated root terminal.

The problem itself is inherited from Debian. In Buster there was a move of the su command from one package to another (I don't know exactly the names, can be found in the internet). They told me now the su command behaves as in any other Unix/Linux. Not that I like it, I see that very often the "normal" user stumbles across this behaviour. Not really user friendly. Not a bug, works as intended by the people knowing better.

That laptop should have a DVD drive. Its possibly easier to boot from there instead of from USB.

And if only 512M of RAM is installed, this isn't good enough to start from.

Edit the headline in your initial post and add a [Solved] or something similar there.

BTW: afaik slim no more is maintained. It might be a good idea to switch to i.e. lightdm.

What are we talking about? Chimaera, Daedalus, Excalibur? Anything else?

Checked on my Daedalus with backports enabled. Synaptic shows version 2.2 from the standard repo, and 3.0 from backports as available. Nothing about 3.6.

The metapackage lazarus-2.2 re. lazarus-3.0 should install the complete suite.

To get hold of version 3.6 you must have added an external repo. What exactly did you do regarding this "trick" to synaptic?

The sources.list seems to be ok, but what is present in /etc/apt/sources.list.d? This tailscale repo must come from somewhere ... Iguess thats the problem.

What have you installed from there?

I use

# apt list libreoffice*

There the backports packages are present. The solution for the complete package is e.g. libreoffice-gtk4 or libreoffice-qt6. There are no single packages for writer.

Anyhow: nothing from backports is installed automagically. Pinning makes sure backports doesn't have highest prio. If you want to install something from backports, you need to specify that by using:

# apt -t daedalus-backports install $Packagename

Maybe this device has some internal setting that keeps it from changing the MAC.