I can understand why you want to be able to boot an iso for rescue/repair, and I can understand why you want to be able to mount your installed partitions from that live system, but I still don't understand why you need to mount the isos. Are you planning to do frequent editing of the iso's boot menu?

According to the xfe docs here: http://roland65.free.fr/xfe/index.php?page=docs
You can mount filesystems with ctrl-M and unmount with ctrl-U. What I can't figure out is how/where you find these unmounted filesystems. I don't see anything in the preferences about volume management or devices. I can only see mounted filesystems.

Edit: Oh, I'm looking at an older version in jessie. I see this for 1.42, which is the version in ascii:

The reason for the point release is to release updated installer isos and live isos with newer software that's in the repo. If you regularly do 'apt update' and 'apt upgrade' or the equivalent, you're already there.

Note: If you're upgrading for the first time an ascii that was installed when ascii was still in testing (around two years ago), you might run into some trouble.  (Happened to me last week.)

I don't understand the error message. You shouldn't need 3D acceleration for synaptic. (And I've never gotten 3D to work in vbox.) How are you starting synaptic?

I have that version of lsb-release and I don't have distro-info-data installed. You should be able to remove it. It's not listed as a Depends or even a Recommends for lsb-release. If that doesn't work, you can edit /etc/lsb-release to say whatever you want.

user@ascii:~$ apt-cache policy lsb-release
lsb-release:
  Installed: 4.1+devuan2
  Candidate: 4.1+devuan2
  Version table:
 *** 4.1+devuan2 500
        500 http://deb.devuan.org/merged ascii/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged ascii/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
user@ascii:~$ apt-cache policy distro-info-data
distro-info-data:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 0.36
  Version table:
     0.36 500
        500 http://deb.devuan.org/merged ascii/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged ascii/main amd64 Packages
user@ascii:~$ apt-cache depends lsb-release
lsb-release
  Depends: python
  Depends: python
  Recommends: apt
  Suggests: lsb
    lsb-compat

If you can devote 1 GB of that usb stick to the rescue system, you shouldn't need to work hard to trim it down. The live system is compressed in a squashfs.

Have you seen this guide for minimal install? It's for jessie, but the basic procedure is valid for any suite.
https://devuan.org/os/documentation/dev … al-install

A debootstrap install will give you the leanest possible base to start with. I prefer to start with an installer iso and un-check all the boxes except 'Standard system utilities' in the tasksel window. Then install what I want, usually excluding Recommends. You might have better luck with the command-line tools (apt or apt-get) instead of synaptic. Getting rid of synaptic will free up a lot of space.

I think you can remove the locales package to get rid of all the extra internationalization files.

When you ran the upgrade, did it include reinstalling grub? Is grub even installed in the live system? Does the computer boot without the usb stick?

Maybe the flash drive is dying.

Maybe the system is just randomly confused and a reboot will fix it. (I'd power off completely then restart.)

Maybe just pulling the stick out and plugging it back in will help. (It will probably be /dev/sdf if you do this.)

What does your boot command look like?  cat /proc/cmdline
What is in persistence.conf?

I don't know Alien-OS. I assume this is a debian-based distro and it uses live-boot and live-config. Is that correct?

Is the OS 32-bit or 64-bit?

Were the system directories on the persistent partition automatically created, or did you create them manually?

Your package selections, system configs and desktop configs will all be copied into the snapshot. You shouldn't need to change any of those once you have it the way you want. But there is a shortcut for that. (explained a little later)

If you just need to rebuild the iso to change things in the boot menu or anything else that's in the root of the iso instead of in the live filesystem there's a really short shortcut.

Make sure the config file is set to save_work="yes"

Run a snapshot.

If you need to change things in the root of the isos, edit whatever you want in /home/work/iso/
Then re-run refractasnapshot and select the option that says 4. Re-run xorriso only. (make iso, no-copy, no-squash)
This will re-run xorriso and only takes a minute or two.

If you want to change something in the system, you could edit config files in /home/work/myfs/ or even chroot that directory and add or remove packages with apt.
Then re-run refractasnapshot and select the option that says
2. Re-squash and make iso (no-copy)
This runs mksquashfs again and takes a little longer.

Try installing it with aptitude and see if it gives you any other options or information about the nature of the conflict.

I can't say why it happened, but there's a good chance it wasn't anything that you did. Take a look at the section on Session management and policykit backends in the release notes. It's a rat's nest of dependencies.
http://files.devuan.org/devuan_ascii/Release_notes.txt

I think you need to remove consolekit. I'm not sure if you'll have problems doing that. You'll need to replace

libpolkit-backend-consolekit-1-0 libpolkit-gobject-consolekit-1-0

with

libpolkit-backend-elogind-1-0 libpolkit-gobject-elogind-1-0

which may or may not happen automatically.

Yell if you need help with it. (And post some terminal output if there are conflicts that you or aptitude can't resolve.)

The 2.1 minimal-live isos both have the same isolinux.bin. The amd64 and i386 are both built using the same xorriso/mkisofs command. The desktop-live i386 and amd64 use slightly different commands, because the amd64 supports uefi. I'm a little bit surprised that the isolinux.bin in the 2.1 minimal-lives are the same as the 2.0.0 you posted.

f03d6ecc57dad4524a0cab76b7afab41

I checked some Refracta isos and the i386 and amd64 are different (assuming for the same reason as the desktop-live) but the md5sums are consistent over time and only change occasionally. Possibly with new versions of isolinux or something else.

Getting back to the original post, I think the problem with installing software is not related to isolinux.bin. Sometimes the installer fails to get all the software and you need to repeat that step. This was more common with jessie isos, but I think it's happened with ascii, too.