It pains me to say this, but the installation program for Devuan Beta2 is
seriously broken. And I say this not as some kind of troll, but rather as a
Devuan enthusiast who has already been running Devuan as my main system for
six months.

The whole problem is getting networking set up either during or after the
install.

Like the majority of computer users out there today, my main method for
getting on the Internet is wifi. I have an Android phone which I never use
as a phone (for talk), but rather as a wireless access point. Where I live
it's faster than DSL and has the added advantage of being totally portable,
ideal when I'm moving around with my laptop. Of course, local coffee shops
all have free wifi as well.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the Devuan installer makes no
provision for getting online via wifi. It seems that a hard wired Ethernet
connection is required. That right there will eliminate about 75% of our
potential users, but it gets worse. After finding a place where I could
plug an Ethernet cable directly into a router, the Devuan installer could
not do autoconfiguration using DHCP. That left me trying to set up
networking manually by typing commands at the command line...eventually I
thought I had that working and proceeded to install, only to find that I
couldn't actually download anything and the installation failed.

In my next attempt, I simply chose the option to install without having
networking set up. This seemed to work - I completed installation, rebooted
and had a nice shiny new Devuan desktop. Great...except that Wicd was not
even installed, and thus I couldn't see any way to set up wifi. I then
looked at the software package list for the Devuan CDs - Wicd deb packages
are not included on the CD or Netinstall versions. I found that two Wicd
packages are included on the DVD, so I downloaded that and used it to
install again, also choosing to not set up networking during the
install...result was that none of the Wicd packages installed.

I even tried downloading (from another computer, of course) all the Wicd
packages onto a USB stick and manually installing them on Devuan with dpkg,
only to run into dependency hell. After about four hours of messing with
all this, I finally gave up.

Refracta saved the day! Thank goodness it exists, or else I would not be
able to install Devuan on any of my machines. Please note that with
Refracta, I did not need to set up networking at all during the
installation, but Wicd was there on the first boot and getting wifi working
was a piece of cake.

If there's something I should have done during the Devuan install but I
missed it, please let me know. However, I should point out that I am a very
experienced Linux user, so if I couldn't set up networking on Devuan, I can
only imagine what a fresh-faced newbie would think.

Having said all that, I do want to emphasize that I am very grateful to
everyone who has worked on this Devuan beta. It's actually a very good,
stable system once you get it installed. It's the installer that is holding
it back, and specifically it's the networking. Fix that, and then you've
got all you need to make the 1.0 release.

best regards to all,
Robert