To install dbus, you would have to go into /etc/apt/preferences.d/ and remove the pins on dbus. (note to self: those pins should really be in their own file, and not in avoid-systemd.) It's possible that other packages with dbus in the name could slip it. I only pinned dbus itself. To see what you have

dpkg -l | grep dbus

Installing openrc is pretty easy either way. I just converted an installed system to openrc to see if it's still easy, and it is. If you convert a system, do yourself a favor and do it in a terminal on the desktop, so you can copy/paste the long command you need to run after installing openrc. (Apt will tell you exactly what to do.)
apt-get install openrc will get you there. My older instructions on this talk about manually installing some libraries, but you no longer need to do that.

Search the forum for openrc and you'll find a few discussions about it.

Edit to add: I've made live isos of systems with openrc using refractasnapshot, and it works without doing anything special. Works easily in live-sdk, too.

Thanks. Any help sorting this out is appreciated. I would include firmware-realtek firmware-ti-connectivity with the wireless firmware. (My laptop uses the former.) Also, in beowulf, firmware-ralink is back. It was included in firmware-realtek for stretch/ascii.

I think the intelwimax is for some older wireless cards. Looks like intel no longer supports it -
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en … -5150.html

One way to do it is to save the package list in a file, then use that list on a new system to get the same installed packages. Check 'man dpkg' before you do this.
On the old system:

dpkg --get-selections > package_list

On the new system:

dpkg --set-selections < package_list

Another way is to run refractasnapshot in a root terminal and make a bootable live-iso copy of your current system (installed packages and configs) and use that to install on other computers. This is my preferred method.

bash ignores lines that start with # but in this it causes the command on the line before it to be terminated instead of continued to the next line.

Correct

Check wicd preferences to make sure the defualt wireless device is set to the correct device. You can see what the device is called if you run ip a or /sbin/ifconfig. You'll find the preferences in a drop-down in wicd's menu bar. (it the triangle/arrow in the upper right of the window.)

Easiest way to include a link in a post is to hightlight the link in your browser's address bar, right-click and copy, then right-click and paste it into your post. No tags needed.

I get "503 Service Unavailable" on your links. Any commented lines in the removal script will be ignored, and those commented packages will not be removed. Everything else should be removed.

I'm not sure what you mean. It's not the exact same list of firmware, but many are the same. Here's what's in the installer isos (this is from a mounted netinstall iso). These are actually symlinks to the packages, which are under /pool.

$ ls mnt/firmware
amd64-microcode_3.20160316.3_amd64.deb                firmware-ivtv_20161130-3_all.deb
atmel-firmware_1.3-4_all.deb                          firmware-iwlwifi_20161130-3_all.deb
bluez-firmware_1.2-3_all.deb                          firmware-libertas_20161130-3_all.deb
dahdi-firmware-nonfree_2.11.1-1_all.deb               firmware-linux-free_3.4_all.deb
firmware-amd-graphics_20161130-3_all.deb              firmware-misc-nonfree_20161130-3_all.deb
firmware-atheros_20161130-3_all.deb                   firmware-myricom_20161130-3_all.deb
firmware-bnx2_20161130-3_all.deb                      firmware-netxen_20161130-3_all.deb
firmware-bnx2x_20161130-3_all.deb                     firmware-qlogic_20161130-3_all.deb
firmware-brcm80211_20161130-3_all.deb                 firmware-realtek_20161130-3_all.deb
firmware-cavium_20161130-3_all.deb                    firmware-samsung_20161130-3_all.deb
firmware-crystalhd_0.0~git20120110.fdd2f19-1_all.deb  firmware-siano_20161130-3_all.deb
firmware-intel-sound_20161130-3_all.deb               firmware-ti-connectivity_20161130-3_all.deb
firmware-intelwimax_20161130-3_all.deb                firmware-zd1211_1.5-4_all.deb
firmware-ipw2x00_20161130-3_all.deb                   hdmi2usb-fx2-firmware_0.0.0~git20151225-1_all.deb

That could possibly be accomplished with some creative symlinking.

I think you can get away with two or three partitions. Root filesystem and optional /boot partition on the ssd and /home on the spinning disk. Install everything to the ssd first, with /home as part of the root partition. Then manually edit fstab (and crypttab, I guess) to use the spinning disk as home. Move the new /home to /home.bak or something, so you keep the new config files in case you need them. And maybe make a backup copy of the old config files, in case they get lost or changed. Using the old config files with the new system may or may not work properly in all cases. It'll be trial and error until you get everything the way you want.

I forgot about swap. You want it encrypted. You could either use a swapfile inside an encrypted root partition, or you could make a new lvm on the ssd that includes the swap.

Caveat and disclaimer: I hate the debian-installer enough that I maintain my own installer.

Take a look at my post with examples of raid/lvm/luks with refractainstaller. I don't know how to do such a complex setup with d-i, but I'm pretty sure you could do it similar to one or more of my examples.
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2323

If you want your home spread over both disks, then you need to have both disks (or at least part of each disk) included in the volume group (or in a raid array). Then data will be written to both disks (striped). That may increase performance.

If you then want /var, /tmp and swap to be only on the spinning disk, they need to be in a separate lvm or raid array (or not in the volume that includes /home.) The same would be true if you wanted them to only be on the ssd. If you're ok with them being spread over both disks like your home, then one volume group will suffice.

If your lvm is inside an encrypted partition, you can still change the sizes of the logical partitions inside it. This way, everything is encrypted and you enter one password for the whole system. If you want to make the lvm bigger than the physical partition that contains it, you would add other drives/partitions to the volume group and then extend the logical partitions within.

If you're concerned about excessive writes to the ssd, then you probably want to keep it separate from the existing lvm, so it doesn't get used for any of your more active partitions. (When you add drives to a volume group, the combined space is seen as a single container, and data gets written to all parts of it.)

I believe it's possible to do what you want, but you might need to do some of it manually. I've done encrypted lvm installs before, but I've never done it with an existing lvm that had data on it. See these two threads (and some of the links in them):
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=674
https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=2323

The procedure in the debian-installer for encrypted lvm is not at all intuitive. It goes something like this:
Make an encrypted volume from a partition.
Use the encrypted volume for lvm.
Create the logical volumes inside the lvm and assign mountpoints and filesystems for them.

For reference, here's a video of making an encrypted partition, without lvm. The "4" on the end of the file name is because it took me four attempts to get it right, even though I've done it many times. This will give you a sense of the logic used in the installer.
http://distro.ibiblio.org/refracta/misc … rypt-4.ogv

At the boot menu, press 'e' to edit the boot command. Add the word, nomodeset, to the linux line. Then ctrl-x to boot. That usually fixes the black screen.