On Fri, 14 Aug 2015 07:01:11 -0400
Haines Brown <haines@???> wrote:


> > 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.

What you describe above is *precisely* how I want things to go. Your
box and my desktop are the same except I use Openbox instead of
fluxbox. I love startx so much my wife is getting jealous.

> 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.

:-) If this were Ubuntu, I'd tell you to do sudo su -

>
> > 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.

Yes, you're right, it's too complicated. I was thinking in Ubuntu-eze,
where the entire distro is designed to never let you boot to command
prompt. At least up to Wheezy (I haven't used Jessie), Debian was
designed to allow booting to CLI via installation, in the manner you
voiced earlier: Install base, install X, install fluxbox, done. In
Debian (and therefore I assume Devuan), what I described should only be
used for troubleshooting purposes.

SteveT

Steve Litt
August 2015 featured book: Troubleshooting: Just the Facts
http://www.troubleshooters.com/tjust