I'd like to see /var/log/refractasnapshot.log. Send it to me in email or paste it somewhere and give me the link. Or read it and see if there's something obvious. I wouldn't expect the decompression error on the initrd to cause a 0-byte iso to be created.

Edit: I just realized you ran the non-gui version, which doesn't make much of a log file unless you run it with the debug option. (That happens automatically with the gui version.)   Run sudo refractasnapshot -d

Make sure you didn't run out of hard drive space. You might need to exclude some things to make the system copy and the squashfs smaller. (3.9G is pretty big.)

In the past, netinstall isos would give you a small and functional base system if you installed without a network. The current netinstall isos won't do that. For an offline install, people should use the server or desktop installer isos or the live isos.

dev-1-dash-1: Thanks for the feedback. We have our wizards working on it.

dev-1-dash-1:  I don't know if you can use jessie to debootstrap beowulf. I would avoid using 'testing' because debian and devuan testing are not the same right now. It might cause problems.

I also don't know if you can install beowulf's debootstrap in jessie. Can't hurt to try.

I do know that all the devuan live isos have debootstrap installed. You could do it from a live session.

kapqp: I see only two lsb packages - lsb-release and lsb-base. They both get installed with the default desktop. The minimal-live just has lsb-base.

Make sure build-essential is installed. (Yes, the package name is singular.)

I think I saw the missing hostname issue once. Didn't happen with most of the installs I did.

Size of the iso was a concern, and the graphical installer takes up a lot of space.

The default setup results in the grub menu showing 'Debian' instead of 'Devuan'.

If you're using legacy bios boot, you can just change /etc/os-release to show ID=devuan and then run update-grub

If you're booting uefi, you'll also need to remove grub-efi-amd64-signed and just use grub-efi-amd64. You will not be able to use secure boot this way.

If you didn't get the 4.19 kernel, you probably don't have the kernel metapackage:

apt install linux-image-amd64

Then you will always get the latest kernel for the system.

If you want to see what kernels are available:

apt-cache search linux-image

I didn't think you would need to use mknod. Since there was no actual device for /dev/sdc, I would expect that there was no /dev/sdc in the filesystem until you made it. I only see as many devices listed as actually exist on my systems. Those get created by udev at boot or when you plug in a removable drive.

I guess you now have a file at /dev/sdc that holds the contents of "a-linux-distro".  If there is no disk /dev/sdc, you can delete the file.

rolfie, I got results similar to yours, except I'm the other side of UTC, so mine have '-' instead of '+'. Don't feel bad about being confused. I've been confused by hwclock for years, so I stay away from it. I set it to UTC and use ntp or ntpdate to keep the right time.

The e1000e driver is in my ascii - it's in the kernel configs for 4.9.0-9 and 4.9.0-11. I don't know why you folks aren't seeing it. On my Thinkpad T420, lsmod shows that it's loaded.

If I boot devuan_ascii_2.1_amd64_netinstall.iso I get an ethernet connection on the Thinkpad, and lsmod shows that e1000e is loaded. This installer iso has 4.9.0-11.

Make sure os-prober is installed and run update-grub and it should create boot entries for the other linux systems.

Note: If the other systems are encrypted, update-grub will not see them. In that case, create menuentries for them in /etc/grub.d/40_custom, and then run update-grub.