On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 05:13:46PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Aug 2015 15:16:21 -0400
> Haines Brown <haines@???> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 01:57:58PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
> > > On Thu, 13 Aug 2015 13:01:14 -0400
> > > Haines Brown <haines@???>, "To:dng"@???,
> > > "Cc:Bcc:"@??? wrote:

> > Aptitude tells me that xfce4 and these specific utilities are not
> > installed.
>
> I suspect that aptitude is wrong, or you are interpreting it wrong. But
> anyway...

No I'm interpreting it correctly. The mystery won't be solved because I
reinstalled.

> Rereading your original post: Do you want to not have a Display Manager
> such as lightdm, kdm, gdm etc, or do you want your computer not to have
> X at all? If the latter, just deinstall X. If the former, you need to
> find your display manager, based on ps axjf.

The aim is to boot to a console prompt, log in as root, install xorg and
fluxbox. That gives me X and a window manager but no desktop
environment. At present I get a log in prompt and can log in as user in
console, but for some reason root log in not working. I suppose that
when I provided a password I mistyped.

> Anyway, luckily for you, you're on Devuan with sysvinit, so I'm pretty
> sure almost any way that you could disable plymouth and lightdm would
> bring you to CLI, from which you could run startx which would work with
> a properly configured ~/.xinitrc.

You describe a complicated scenario. I've never had to go through all
that because I've always simply done expert install, avoided installing
a desktop environment, and then in console install xorg and
fluxbox. Over the years never had a problem.

Thanks,

Haines