I've burned the dunce hat so you can't have it

Anyway, for the OP: post the contents of the file

/etc/apt/sources.list

Another wise thing to do:

su #type root password and press enter
#if your system uses sudo, use this command instead: sudo su
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade && reboot

This updates your entire system and may take some time. It should also deal with any policy issues mentioned before. Notice the word should, I've never used this policy stuff before.

It can't. Linux doesn't have a chance to become the #1 most used OS on the planet. It already is

• Android is based on Linux. No idea how much market share Android currently has, but it's substantial

• Every time you hit a webpage on the WWW, Linux does its job serving it to you, from your router to the root server and back again. And for all other 5bn web users on this planet. Every day, every second, millions of times

• About 99% of devices in your house use Linux in one form or another

But most people don't know, because Linux doesn't show off it's flashiness and stuff, it just does its job. And that's all that matters

Many thanks. Installed elogind backend and about to reboot to see if it works.

[edit] Aaaand it does Consolekit appears functionally incomplete ATM. Well, at least in my experience.

Guess so. But that doesn't mean it's therefore inherently unsafe/dangerous/unusable after that time. I've been running the last pre-systemd Debian for years after it made the change to systemd as default init system. Only in 2015 did I make the switch to Funtoo (couldn't get Gentoo to work and the Funtoo guide was so inclusive even I could successfully complete it ) and after I found Devuan I stuck with it for a while

As long as you keep your wits about and don't do stupid things, like browsing unsafe websites and stuff, ASCII will work just fine. But in time you'll notice stuff does get outdated and no longer supported and websites may no longer work as you'd expect, or at all. But this is Linux: grab the source of your $browser, configure, compile, build and install it and you're done.   It's a pity Beowulf is such a PITA, but the underlying issues are not the fault of the Devuan dev's but lay with Debian or perhaps elsewhere upstream.

Well, 3 days on, no lockups. It seems the culprit was indeed some stray Beowulf config that got blasted when I re-installed ASCII. Good riddance!

Next step: see if AQemu works, despite the IOMMU BIOS setting being disabled by default. Goal: run Win7 as VM.

I'm pretty sure it's not the mainboard, as that's been running stable for the past 6 years. Before my unfortunate "upgrade" to Beowulf, the CPU I'd put in last month was also stable. Both are fairly old so should be supported in Linux. So, I'm suspecting a remnant of Beowulf config somewhere as I've re-installed ASCII again this morning, after I removed a number of no-longer used dot files/folders in my users home dir. So far it hasn't locked up on me. See how long that lasts.

Come to think of it, it could be related to power management and/or screensaver stuff instead. I have the screensaver turned off and the power management switched off to the maximum intent, but after a period of no user input (mouse, kb), the screen still blanks itself (which is probably inside the monitor). I need to look that up and see if I can counter this behaviour (IIRC there was a kernel option to disable it, not sure)

(PS: for those who want to look it up, the mainboard is a Gigabyte F2A88XM-D3H with BIOS version F8, CPU is an AMD APU: PRO A10-8750B, no separate discrete GPU)

Well, after one too many freeze up I ditched Beowulf, tried to get Funtoo to work (but a core package for Mate failed to configure repeatedly and consequently build) then late last night I took my ASCII USB stick and booted from it. Installed ASCII, but sadly, the random freezes are still there. It might be related to Firefox, may need to look into that.

So, not a happy chappy here, to say the least >:-{  I may try Mint, but that means [shudder] systemd :puke:

Well, for the 2nd time tonight Beowulf crashed. I was browsing while playing 2 local video files (via smplayer and vlc respectively) and it froze solid. No input, audio looped continuously, no response at all. Only a hard reset could solve the issue. This was on the Xen-enabled kernel. On ASCII, this scenario was perfectly fine and it could do this literally all day and never miss a beat. Now running the non-Xen kernel, see if that changes anything.

So far, Beowulf impresses me badly for all the wrong reasons

Yeah, I did that too now. Didn't solve all issues, I still can't load a module required for Qemu. As root:

# echo $PATH
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
# modprobe kvm-amd
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'kvm_amd': Operation not supported
# modprobe kvm_amd
modprobe: ERROR: could not insert 'kvm_amd': Operation not supported
# modprobe -c | grep kvm_amd
alias cpu:type:x86,ven*fam*mod*:feature:*00C2* kvm_amd

So, what next?

Regrettably, that wasn't an option during my upgrade.

So, what a difference a few days make. It turns out the problem was of my own making, typical PEBKAC! I'd forgotten to update the BIOS and the old version didn't support he 'new' APU. (insert facepalm smiley)