I installed from alpha2, and it mostly worked.
Devuan boots up properly, and runs. I'm currently ssh-ed in to another
machine where I have my email, accessible via mutt.

There were a few glitches:

(1) it still offered to install the system on my installer USB stick.
I wasn't stupid enough to fall for this ruse, and specified my hard
drive.

(2) Going through the steps one by one, I got to setting up MD devices.
I made the mistake of asking it to do this. I had no MD devices on this
machine, so I expected it just to moce on to the next step, after
possibly dong some internal overhead to tell it this had been done.

Instead, the screen went blank and stayed that way for a long time (at
least ten minutes). For a while the disk light on my laptop blinked,
then even taht stopped. I eventually used ctl-alt-F2 to get a console,
but a few commands there (such as ps) left me no wiser. I went back to
ctl-alt-F1, and after a long hesitation, did control-C.

I recovered control, and once again was aat the set up MD devices
step. I bypassed it and went on to the next step.

(3) The 'configure the package manager' step worked, but the text on
that page refers to Debian, not Devuan.

(4) popcon: The text says it sends popularity stats to
http://popcon.debian.org. Now perhaps devuan does not have a popcon
server set up yet. In any case, I bypassed this step, lest I
contaminate Debian's statistics. Was that the righht thing to do?

(5) The select and install software step told me it would take about an
hour. I went away and did other things, such as laundry. When I came
back to the laptop I was faces with the message that this step had
failed, and that I could either skip this step or retry it.

I retried it and this time it succeeded.

What might th eprooble have been? Network congestion? Weird package
dependencies? I have no idea.

(6) When it came time to install grup, it told me that my machine does
an EFI boot. That was a surprise to me. It is an ancient XP laptop,
and I just replaced its hard disk with a new, empty one before the
install (this no WIndows). I did let it install an EFI bootloader on a
USB stick (my installlation USB stick, as it happened) and it did
something.

But the machine booted properly without using the stick.

The machine is an Asus EEEPC 1000He, the first of the EEEPC's that did
not need any proprietary Linux drivers, and the first that came with
Windows installed instead of Linux.

I installed from the devuan-jessie-netboot-i386-alpha2.iso

-- hendrik