@Head_on_a_Stick

Thanks for the erase reference. I found the hdparm one a long time ago on Arch's wiki, I think.

Back to the original question. I thought I'd just uninstall firefox-esr and reinstall it, thinking that a fresh start might be the solution. But after entering "apt purge firefox-esr," I was informed that Chromium would be installed at the same time. I declined. Is there any way to uninstall/reinstall firefox-esr without adding something from the googlebeast?

I downloaded Beowulf (devuan_beowulf_3.0.0_amd64-desktop.iso) and "burned" a USB flash drive with it using dd. I tried to install Beowulf on a wiped Samsung SSD, which has no bad sectors according to gnome-disk-utility, attached via USB. The installation went fine until I was asked to choose an init system. I chose the default systemV. As soon as I pressed Continue, the screen went all blue, except for the bottom black bar. A long time after that (many minutes), the Grub screen appeared. After pressing Continue, I was informed that the Grub installation had failed.

@Head_on_a_Stick

Thanks for the reply. Safe mode does not fix the problem.

I installed from a 2.0 ISO, so I must be running ASCII. "apt policy" showed a bunch of v=2.0 and v=2.1 lines. Cinnamon is 3.2.7-4, as per Synaptic.

@Marjorie

Thanks for the reply. In a few days, I will build a new system on a spare SSD using a 3.0 ISO. I'll use your themes and see what my old eyes think about it.

@markw

Thanks for the detailed response. You saved me lots of time searching for files and looking through directories for appropriate files.

Thanks for the assistance.

@golinux I assumed that sources.list would be read by Synaptic. I was wrong.

@rolfie So that's the way to specify a repository when installing. And backports makes sense now in the context of packages existing in testing, but not stable.

First, thanks to everyone who responded. I had emergencies, so I left this for a while.

I installed lightdm and gtk-greeter. With the former, I was pleasantly surprised that I was prompted as to which display manager I wanted, slim or lightdm, though slim was advertised as a simple login manager. I rebooted because I wanted to see the behavior of the login screen. It was the familiar lightdm one. I tried to login, but it immediately returned me to the login screen. I looked at the desktop selector, which was set to default xsession. I selected MATE and everything was back to normal. Now lightdm is not magic to me.

@fsmithred

I reboot once per day at a minimum. I often reboot a few times each day because I switch back-and-forth between different Linux distributions and Windows 10.

@Camtaf

The mknod man page is pretty sparse. One webpage suggested to determine major and minor numbers by looking at /usr/src/linux, but that directory does not exist. I found a webpage from kernel.org (https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/ke … evices.txt) which appears to be the bible for device numbers. According to that, my command should be "mknod /dev/sdc b 8 32." I rolled the dice and it appeared to complete a dd. I'll post again later after I test it to see if it was a success.