That log shows that you chose to re-use an existing home partition. If you did that with a new (empty) partition, it would have remained empty. If instead you had chosen the option to "Create a new separate home" it would have copied the files from /home in the live system to the home partition on the sd card.

You're not the first to be confused by this, but I hope you're the last. The option to re-use an existing home as been removed in the next version. 9.5.3 is in ceres, and I plan for it to be in the ascii point-release.

If you got a refractainstaller log in your home, I'd like to see it and try to figure out what went wrong. You can send it to me at gmail or paste it somewhere and provide the link.

Thanks.

Welcome to devuan. I used zenwalk for a year before switching to debian (etch) for its vast repository, so I understand where you're coming from.

The live installer has grown rather clunky, especially since adding support for uefi. It's due for an overhaul. I'm pleased you were able to install to an mmc device. I assume you used the graphical installer, and it showed your partitions correctly. You're the first I've heard of doing that, and I've been wondering if it really works.

Upgrade to beowulf will not mess with /usr or /sbin. It won't change your directories.

Welcome home! Not sure if you saw my no-dbus experiment: https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2158
I just happened to be looking at that again today with a mind to create a live-sdk blend for the no-dbus build. (live-sdk is for automated building of live-CD isos.)

Here's one I made (manually) in September. Um, two nodbus builds; i386 and amd64. The one with bpo in the name is ascii with backports kernel (and with dbus.)
https://get.refracta.org/files/experimental/

These isos are POC and fun, but probably not for production.

Thanks, for that. I can make those changes in a point release. I had made a couple isos in October that were under 700mb, but then I ran update/upgrade and the snapshots grew. The initrd should have already been xz compressed unless it somehow reverted during upgrades.

Package list is mostly the same. Dropped atril and all the mate system utils and put in xpdf. Forgot to add noscript in the i386. Probably forgot something else, too.

I thought refracta-lang was specific for lightdm. I switched to lxdm mainly because I was getting better results with other languages.

Speaking of beowulf, I had to make a couple of custom live-config scripts for it. One for lxdm so that it doesn't expect lxde, and one for openssh-server, which hangs on boot while waiting for enough entropy to make the host keys. That one is here - http://distro.ibiblio.org/refracta/file … sh-entropy

Suggested listing:
  ThomOS (formerly Crunkbong)

Siva, you didn't mention it, but login/password are thomos/thomos

System boots to console login. Login leads to automatic graphical session in openbox. I don't know how you got no autologin without adding 'noautologin' to the boot command, but you need to either add 'nox11autologin' or do something else to get rid of /etc/profile.d/zz-live-config_xinit.sh.

The boot item for foreign language does not work. The syntax 'lang=it_IT' is specific for lightdm along with refracta-lang, a custom live-config script for changing locale and keyboard at boot. I don't know if it still works. (you don't have that script, anyway). The standard method does work:
locales=it_IT.UTF-8 keyboard-layouts=it

That's as far as I got for now. More later. Looks good so far.

Setting the default release changes the priority from 500 to 990 on the ascii main version. I just tested it - they were both 500 before I set the default.

I guess you'll need to add '-t ascii-security' to your install command.

This should show you the available commands, and those commands should have man pages. If not, try running each command with the '--help' option.

ls /usr/bin/dvb*

W: Download is performed unsandboxed as root as file '/root/.synaptic/tmp//tmp_sh' couldn't be accessed by user '_apt'. - pkgAcquire::Run (13: Permission denied)

That's the message you get when you download a package as root. Download as ordinary user instead.

What message do you get when you run

apt install dvb-apps

If it's already installed, apt will tell you that. Look in /usr/share/doc/dvb-apps for information. The package description says "interface::commandline" so that might explain why it's not in the menu.

dpkg -L dvb-apps

will give you a list of the files in the package. That will include a list of any commands. There will probably be man pages for those commands.

I'm not sure what success you're expecting. Did you repack the initrd, and if so, what changes did you make to it? Or are you still trying to unpack it?

file /boot/initrd.img-4.19.0-2-amd64 should tell you what compression is used. Use the corresponding zcat or xzcat command above to unpack it. Tell me which compression was used and what you found inside the initrd. Possible choices of things to do would be remove the offending files, edit the offending files, maybe something else.

Maybe you're missing these?

Rebuild initrd with gzip compression:
find . -print0 | cpio -0 -H newc -o | gzip -c > ../initrd.img

Rebuild initrd with xz compression:
find . | cpio -o -H newc | xz --check=crc32 --x86 --lzma2=dict=512KiB > ../initrd.img

Then of course, you have to replace the original with your changed version. (keep a backup copy of the original and copy the modified one to /boot, and make sure the name corresponds to what your boot menu expects it to be.)

The initrd is not in gzip format. Use this line instead:

xzcat /initrd.img | cpio -d -i -m

Yes, you can just call the initrd directly (in /boot) instead of using the symlink.

Please get refractainstaller 9.5.2 from ceres. It should be in the repo by now (or very soon.)

As ordinary user, in your home run the following commands.

mkdir extracted
cd extracted
zcat /initrd.img | cpio -i

Then look in conf/conf.d/zz-resume-auto. If you have more than one kernel, you can replace '/initrd.img' with the real paths, '/boot/initrd.img-4.whatever' (but unpack them into different directories, like extracted and extracted2 for instance.)

My beowulf has conf/conf.d/resume. I don't know why yours is different.