Ged, thank you for the reply. But it leaves questions in my mind.

On Sat, Jun 03, 2017 at 02:04:05PM +0100, G.W. Haywood wrote:

> >Installation of Jessie 1.0.1 AMD64 went well.
>
> Considering what you write below, I'm not entirely convinced. :)
>
> >I did not install desktop packages during install, but instead xorg
> >afterwards along with a lot of other packages.
>
> This starts to look like Pilot Error, but in fairness I suspect that
> what you're trying to do might also be beyond the capacity of the
> system that you're trying to do it with at this stage in its life.
> Devuan Jessie is, in software terms, rather new. If you stress the
> package installation you can expect to break it in interesting ways,
> which may make recovery difficult if you're not an expert.

I have an installation routine I've used since Lenny and perhaps even
Etch. I stuck to it, and generally accepts defaults.

The system is a bit old (3 yrs), but has 32 G RAM and 1 T disks. It
should be able to endure an install.

Don't know what it means to "stress" package installation. It's the same
set of packages I had not problem installing on earlier versions of
Debian. Are you suggesting that Devuan Jessie might have some
installation weaknesses not present in Debian Jessie?

> >I rebooted, and now I can't run any executable. ...
> > $ aptitude search xorg
> > -bash: /usr/bin/aptitude: No such file or directory
> >...
> >No idea what happened. The executables are in PATH. ...
>
> The symptoms look to me like those of a broken library setup, I think
> you have somehow mixed 32-bit and 64-bit packages. Perhaps you should
> start the installation again without trying anything, er, creative. :)

How can a package installation damage existing libraries? How is it
possible to mix 32-bit and 64-bit if one follows the installer's
defaults?

I installed packages from the US Devuan repository. Perhaps I should
instead have installed them from my USB key DVD ISO. I'll try that when
I have the time.

> Incidentally mailing list etiquette suggests replies on-list, not
> private replies, to list posts. That way everyone can benefit. I'm
> not upset or offended by off-list replies but my mail server will now
> gently reject them as a reminder to those who forget the conventions.

My apologies, I didn't see that you were answering my question off list.

Haines