Sorry, I was busy doing other things. No, I'm not offended easily, as golinux mentioned, and certainly not about which editor to use. .I knew you were kidding. However, if I ever announce that I'm going to run notepad in wine, you are welcome to come down on me hard.

If you can make a package that works, you could put it up anywhere and tell people about it. If you want to try to get it into the devuan repo, you should set it up on git.devuan.org and follow the d1h directions in the Documentation section of this forum. Other than that, you seem to know what to do. Mess with the package, test it, and then I'm not sure why you would revert your system if you just created a solution. For versioning, you should check the debian documentation on that. You could use the same version as the source you're using and add a +something like we do for the devuan packages. But really, check the docs. It can be a bit confusing. (is for me, anyway).

Mint/ubuntu seem to be slow at everything. Not just booting. Trying to run them in a VM can give me an anxiety attack from waiting for something to respond.

Yeah, that makes sense. You tried to install grub-pc in a uefi system. You only need to install the grub packages if the wrong grub is installed in the live system. In this case, grub-efi is installed, so you should boot in efi mode and let the installer handle to bootloader. You might not be able to use legacy bios with gpt partitions. And that uefi readme in the user's home is probably wrong and needs to be updated.

It might be better to use the cli installer, because that's a newer version, and I know it works well in a uefi install. Run 'refractainstaller' in a root terminal, or even better, (if you can stand to look at additional and distracting output on the screen) 'refractainstaller -d' to get a more verbose error log.  One drawback is that you'll have to type in /dev/nvme-whatever to tell it which partition to install.

No emacs here. Just vi, which I do not like. I can tolerate vim, but plain old vi always screws me up. I inevitably hit an arrow key to move the cursor, and it spits out inappropriate characters. I would put vim on my isos, except for the fact that it takes up too much space, and I try to keep the isos down to CD size. But I'm perfectly happy with nano. If I forget how to use it, the instructions are right there in front of my face.

When you tried to boot after installing, did you get anything? A grub boot menu or even a grub prompt? If so, it should be possible to boot with the right commands.

Did you look at the efi partition to see if anything got copied there?
There should be /boot/efi/EFI/<devuan or refracta>/grubx64.efi

Catprints, you got the one that's in ascii-proposed. I think it's the same as the one in ascii main except for the version.

Geoff42 is right - I forgot about libeudev1.

To force old interface names, add 'net.ifnames=0' to the boot command. (edit /etc/default/grub and then run update-grub)

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="net.ifnames=0"

fungus, 220:whatever is not the newest version. I think it's the oldest version.

Something like this should work...

apt-get install eudev=3.2.2-9

and you'll probably be warned that you're downgrading. (It's not a downgrade. We changed the way it's numbered.)

It's a kernel feature. I don't think it has anything to do with the init system, but I'm not sure about what the rest of systemd does with it.

Did you notice any difference in performance after you changed it?

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt

Your link shows that so far, it's only fixed in sid. That means it's also fixed in ceres. It's only been about a week, so I guess the fix will be moving down to testing and stable soon. Whenever that happens in debian, it will happen in devuan a minute or two later. I hope they fix it in oldstable, too.

aptitude -t sid search linux-image-4.14
p   linux-image-4.14.0-1-amd64                           - Linux 4.14 for 64-bit PCs

aptitude show linux-image-4.14.0-1-amd64
Package: linux-image-4.14.0-1-amd64      
New: yes
State: not installed
Version: 4.14.2-1

apt-cache policy linux-image-4.14.0-1-amd64
linux-image-4.14.0-1-amd64:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 4.14.2-1
  Version table:
     4.14.2-1 0
        100 http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/ ceres/main amd64 Packages
         10 http://debian.csail.mit.edu/debian/ sid/main amd64 Packages

Don't use debian mirrors in your sources.list (or in synaptic). Only use devuan.
Make sure you have non-free repos enabled.
Update (Reload? I forget what it says in synaptic)
Install firmware-iwlwifi

That one usually works for me without a reboot. Usually.

I've heard a few other people who had trouble with rufus. Try rawrite:
http://www.netbsd.org/~martin/rawrite32/

The wireless firmware package that you need is already installed in the live isos. What error message did you get, and what did you do to get that message?

Can you use a wire for the install instead of wireless? Sometimes it's easier to set up the wireless after you get the system installed.

I just ran into this doing a debootstrap install of ascii. Here's a way around it. The needed packages are in ascii-proposed. When they move into the main ascii repo, this will no longer be a problem.

In chroot: add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list (note that it's /devuan not /merged like the others.)

deb http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/devuan/ ascii-proposed main

Then run

apt-get update
apt-get -t ascii-proposed install util-linux libfdisk1

Then you can install other things. I have no idea what's missing in your system now. I had to do the above before I could install the kernel. You probably need to run upgrade and dist-upgrade again, maybe apt --fix-missing, or maybe you'll get other instructions.

I have a partial answer to the original dilemma. I made a live usb of devuan ascii (and udev), with persistence. There's no 70-persistent-net.rules in the live isos by design, and there's none in my ascii anyway. Normally (jessie and older) with persistence, the one that gets created at boot sticks around, and you have to either delete it or change your settings to eth1, 2... or wlan1, 2 (I think I've gone up to 8 in the past.)

This particular system has wicd on it, and there are settings for default wired and wireless interfaces. They're set to eth0 and wlan0. I added net.ifnames=0 so that the old names will be used.

Booted one laptop and was automatically connected with the wire. Wicd saw the nearby wireless signals.
Booted another laptop and was automatically connected. Wicd worked, too.
In both cases, the only interfaces were eth0 and wlan0. They did not increment.

Explanation: Hand-waving-argument, magic. I don't know. But I think you'll be ok when you move your system to different hardware.

Bug me in a couple of weeks to see if I tried it with eudev yet.

Huh? What's missing? What extra stuff is disturbing you? I never noticed a difference.

To enable multi-arch:

dpkg --add-architecture i386

Then you should be able to install the i386 versions of packages.