I agree with Katolaz, more than likely a polkit issue. You shouldnt need to edit fstab to make an ntfs partition mount, more info on your system is needed at this point.

What is the output of below ls command?

ls /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/

Do you have ntfs-3g installed from the devuan repos?

You say ntfs partitions used to be able to mount, so did it just stop mounting when you click on them in the file manager?

Thankyou for the news KatolaZ, much appreciated.

Hi Pedro, i will most likely get a cheap usb3 to sata 3.5 inch enclosure for the old hdd. This hdd is a 500 mb spin disk and is older than the dell optiplex by two years, maybe 3 given production time. It was out of my 2008 quad core dell xps at the time. Still going, its just a standard 7200 rpm seagate drive but will probably die sooner rather than later with continued use so i will just get all the personal info off and turn it into a spare drive, may even just fill it up with compressed personal photos and info and not use it but keep it as a time capsule.

I need to transition to more updated equipment before the hardware i have is obsolete or made obsolete, so ssd and newer motherboards and cpu on the horizon when i can afford it.

No i dont play around with virtual machines anymore. Im not a gamer either, at best i just want it to play music and video well and that would be about it. That price is assembled by the local computer shop, i could probably do it myself but i get a 12 month warranty if they do it so its worth it that way i believe. One thing i am a bit curious about is the lack of an operating system and hard drive as i will be doing this myself, i wonder if they will be able to do it without one? Will have to ask them i suppose. I have my personal hard drive from the dell im hoping i can just plug in and reconfigure.

I havent looked at newegg so thanks for bringing that up i will check those out. Good to hear you had a nice experience, it always helps others when reccomendations like this come through.

Not sure what is going on sorry.

What i mean by using xlsfonts is try a few fonts from a list of xfonts, you should have bitstream installed so put the below line in place of where your fonts is in the xsceensaver, this just to narrow it down as not a font issue perhaps?

-bitstream-terminal-medium-r-normal--18-140-100-100-c-110-iso8859-1

Not saying that helvetica is something to search for but it should bring up the adobe helvetica fonts atleast.

try...

xlsfonts | grep adobe

I didn't see anything to do with swap in that link i posted?

All it basically boils down to is not using discard and using fstrim, you can set a cron job to take care of fstrim, once a week should be ok. As kotalaz and rolfie pointed out, Modern ssd is much better than in years gone by, which gives me some encouragement to buy one and try it out.

What i find encouraging with Devuan as a desktop is the few that have the knowledge who put in the time to create stable blends such as  refracta, miyo, star, etc. Not everyone's cup of tea when you are not familiar with a slimmed down gnu linux desktop os, but they are there and workable and more often than not they back them up with help here on the forum and possibly elsewhere as applicable. I class myself as a desktop end user, i have no need for server ability or databases as i am not that user, however i do tinker and i like programs to run well and be usable and that is what Devuan does well 99.9 percent of the time, that stable factor.
I do hope Debian and Devuan have a place to exist together as far as init is concerned and it doesn't go all the way to systemd which in many users opinion is total bloat and not needed for many applications within the gnu linux sphere.

@cynwulf, i respect your opinion and my question was somewhat rhetorical. Im definitely not someone you should be telling and asking questions of such as in your last post. Ive always admired your posts on this forum and elsewhere so dont think for a second im being argumentative, i just have an enquiring mind and sometimes i will ask questions and or tell it how i think it is, right and wrong to get a clearer picture from those like yourself and others who know more than i do. 

@golinux, too true

@cynwulf, you didn't have anything to say about my example?

For the most part of your argument, you are possibly reading into this thread far more than you should be. In regards to ESR, to me it reads like " oh my computers cant run devuan, so im going to critique devuan from the point of view of a ubuntu and mint user" .......yeah whatever.

Edit: I just dont think you cynwulf get what devuan actually is neither does esr.

Give nnn a try first msi, has no dependencies and is under 60kb in size, it does not have the functionality of ranger in some respects but it is lightning fast and has some pretty nifty controls and switches. Its a no bloat type of file manager but really functional imo.

Looks interesting, i will have to give a try.

I have been using nnn the Noice is Not Noice, a noicer fork... a term based file manager like ranger and it has a functionality to save bookmarks like below in bashrc. But i like your idea better as its outside of any program term based fm like nnn or ranger and such.

     NNN_BMS: bookmark string as key_char:location pairs (max 10) separated by ;:

         export NNN_BMS='d:~/Documents;u:/home/user/Cam Uploads;D:~/Downloads/'

         NOTE: Bookmark keys should be single-character to use them in combination with the Leader key.

https://github.com/jarun/nnn

Its not in devuan stable i had to compile it.