I thought I'd give this a try, so I installed parrot in a virtualbox vm. I can't get the installed system to boot. It hangs somewhere around starting samba. Can't boot to rescue mode, either.

Excellent! Once you figure out all the things not to do, the path will be clear.

If the kernel is a deb package and it's a newer version, it should automatically be set to the default in the boot menu when it's installed. Install newer kernel, reboot, remove older kernel (maybe later, just in case new kernel has bugs). I usually upgrade the kernel last, after the first reboot into the upgraded system.

Wired or wireless? Wired is easy - remove network manager. If that breaks your connection, run dhclient eth0 and install wicd-gtk (and/or wicd-curses if you want to work in console). Wireless wtihout encryption works the same way - just use wlan0 instead of eth0.

You can install spacefm any time. It won't make other file managers go away.

Upgrade in terminal or console is probably better than doing it in synaptic. (I never tried the latter.)

Gnuinos is another one that uses debian-installer, has all free software and uses a libre kernel.

Refracta and Exegnulinux have all free software but use a different installer.

Miyo, have you seen the question about non-free in the ascii installer isos? If so, which iso did you use? Thanks.

Fernando,

I don't know much about the inner workings of the debian-installer, but what little I know confirms that it's an ugly hairball. I agree that the user should be alerted to the fact that their hardware might require non-free firmware, they should be given the choice to install it or not, and the appropriate repositories should be included in sources.list.

That's what I recall happening with the devuan jessie installer isos. I've been testing ascii in virtualbox, so I haven't run into any need for firmware. I'm looking into this.

wdq,

Simple answer: It's all about the user being able to make an informed choice.

Edit: In the hardware installs I've done, I chose eth0 for the network instead of wlan0, and the wireless firmware was not installed. No non-free or contrib packages were installed. (intel quad i7, intel graphics, realtek wireless)

Devuan uses Debian's kernels unchanged. Same for the intel microcode package. If you're using pkgmaster.devuan.org or deb.devuan.org in your sources, you'll get the changes within a couple hours of debian making them available. If you're using auto.mirror.devuan.org or packages.devuan.org, you'll get them within a day.

According to this, 4.15 has been patched (at least once) -
https://security-tracker.debian.org/tra … -2017-5754

Latest update on amd64-microcode is December 5 version.
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/amd64-microcode

intel-microcode  is March 12 version, in stretch/ascii backports
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/intel-microcode

I don't know how many patches there have been or if we have the latest.

That's not quite correct. The addition of non-free to sources.list in the installer isos was an error. The addition of non-free wireless firmware in the live isos is the result of a decision. The live isos are frequently used by people to test devuan and by those who prefer to install without a mirror. Without the non-free firmware, a lot of people would not be able to get online and would not even know if their hardware is supported. We made it easy to remove the non-free firmware. If you prefer to have a system that never had it installed, then you can use the regular installer isos.

Note: the above-mentioned bug in the installer has been fixed.
https://git.devuan.org/devuan-packages/ … 7f366965c0

Is this what you want?
https://transfer.sh/FgcX7/ru.png

dpkg-reconfigure locales

checked ru_RU.UTF-8, selected en_US.UTF-8 as default locale.
Rebooted and added 'locales=ru_RU.UTF-8 keyboard-layouts=ru' to the linux line of the boot command, but this did not work. (It does work in a live iso). Rebooted again and tried another language to confirm. It still didn't work.

What did work:
On login with lxdm, selected Russian in language and keyboard boxes.
I'm using openbox, lxpanel, lxterminal, leafpad and spacefm. I opened a few other programs randomly (I can't read anything here) and I see Russian. Even xarchiver, which for some reason is in English in the apps menu, has Russian in the menu bar.

You tried to update a live system. Ouch. It can be done, but understand what's going on. If you set it up for full persistence, then any changes or additions get stored on the persistent partition, in their normal location (i.e. full path). That persistent file system gets overlaid on the read-only live system.

So anything you changed did not make any changes in the live system on the first partition. If you boot without persistence and mount the persistent partition, you can see those files and delete anything that isn't your personal stuff. Then when you reboot with persistence, it will be just like the first time.

If you update the kernel, you'll only be updating the one in /boot in your live system. But the live system gets booted from the kernel in the /live folder in the root of the iso (or device). The kernel in /boot only gets used after a normal installation. Same is true for the initrd. You would need to copy those from /boot to /live and name them to match what's there (and what's in your boot menu). This might be the source of your wifi problems. Another possibility is if your update switched you from udev to eudev and the network interface names changed. Check the interface names with 'ifconfig' or 'ip a' and make sure that wicd is using the right name. (little triangle in upper right will get you to preferences in wicd)

One more catch - the first partition is read-only during a live session. So either plug the sd card into another system to mount it and copy the files or use an undocumented trick to copy the files. Since jessie, if you run with persistence, your root user will be able to write to the first partition. In fact, you don't even need a persistent volume to do this - you just need the word, persistence, in the boot command. When you do this, you might notice (hint: look!) that the first partition is mounted at /lib/live/mount/persistence/ instead of /lib/live/mount/medium/.

Last bit of advice - full persistence is nice for saving files and making some config changes. When you start running updates or adding software, you're filling up your space, and you're making less of your system read-only (aka - unhackable). If you want to make big changes like that, you might be better off making a new iso. You can then copy the contents of that iso to the sd card to replace the files with the updated system. You may or may not need to delete any system files that are on the persistent partition.

Oh yeah, the menu label. Those labels should be unique. If you get to the isolinux boot prompt, you can type that label in, press enter, and it will boot from that stanza. With two of them the same, I don't know which one would boot. My preference would be to change them to HDD and SD to keep them short and memorable, in case I ever need to type them in.

I'm not very clear on your setup, but you should be able to boot without persistence, mount both persistent partitions and copy from one to the other with rsync. Something like

rsync -avx mounted-source/ mounted-target/