It was intended as genuine advice rather than a criticism.

No idea, sorry. FWIW the systemd journal is excellent for stuff like this. *dives for cover*

Most answers applicable to Debian can also be used for Devuan.

What is it that you want from this mysterious "bind-utils" package? http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/vi … utils.html suggests that the bind9 package will provide everything you need.

There is a specific bind-utils package in Debian's experimental repositories, perhaps you could try backporting that.

Can we see the entire (un-grep'd) output? I only use OpenRC with Alpine Linux so I'm not sure how Devuan order their services.

Otherwise check the logs for any clues.

"i5" is pretty meaningless in isolation because it applies to all CPUs from 2009. FWIW beowulf won't support 10th generation Intel hardware even with the backported kernel because the intergrated graphics chip needs a newer Mesa version.

The varnish package is drawn from Debian's repositories so it may be best to reproduce this bug in a Debian system and open a bug report against their package with the patch attached. Just don't mention Devuan in the bug report, some of the Debian developers are funny about that.

Sorry, I don't understand the question but to install the non-free firmware /etc/apt/sources.list should look like this:

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf main contrib non-free
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf-updates main contrib non-free
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged beowulf-security main contrib non-free

Then use

# apt update
# apt install firmware-misc-nonfree

There's also live-sdk.

EDIT: and Debian's live-build but I haven't been able to make that work with sysvinit as PID1. Of course that could just be because I'm useless

That's strange, the LXQt desktop metapackage only lists wicd as a Recommends and it also has network-manager-gnome or nm-tray as alternatives for that.

Does this work:

apt install --simulate nm-tray wicd{,-cli,-curses,-daemon,-gtk}-

If that still results in a mass removal then just disable wicd instead:

# update-rc.d wicd defaults-disabled

Fantastic. Please edit the title of the thread (in the first post) and prepend [SOLVED] to help others who may encounter this issue.

Perhaps because systemd allows for socket activation, which is not possible under sysvinit. But that's just a guess.

And please also note that those packages are still marked for autoremoval so you should attend to that unless you don't want them.

Oops, sorry:

apt -s -o Debug::pkgProblemResolver=yes install pcscd

And please use code tags when posting terminal output (as I have added to your quotes), it greatly aids readability.

EDIT: ah, I see the problem — you have the backported version of the libpcsclite1 dependency installed so you need the backported pcscd version:

# apt install -t beowulf-backports pcscd

Or try aptitude instead, that would probably offer to upgrade pcscd from beowulf-backports.

^ So those are the dodgy third-party repositories and the reason why they've broken your box is because you've tried to use their stretch repositories rather than the buster versions. So change stretch to buster in the sources file then update the package database and try installing the packages again.

Use this to find the relevant sources file:

grep 'eid.belgium.be' /etc/apt/sources.list{,.d/*}