On Sun, Jun 04, 2017 at 02:54:22PM +0100, G.W. Haywood wrote:
> Hello Haines,
>
> On Sun, 4 Jun 2017, Haines Brown wrote:
>
> >I have an installation routine I've used since Lenny and perhaps
> >even Etch. I stuck to it, and generally accepts defaults.
>
> A list of exactly what you started with and exactly what you did,
> step-by-step, would be more useful to the problem-finding. You've
> made a start in your reply to KatolaZ although it's a bit woolly.

I will do that.

> It looks like the problem (if it's only one, and I'm starting to
> wonder) happened independently of installing sets of packages.

Yes, I've come to that conclusion as well.

> I'm almost sure that the damage is that you have mixed architectures.
> You have either a 32-bit binary looking for 32-bit executables or a
> 64-bit binary looking for 64-bit executables and in neither case is it
> finding them. When you look in the directory tree you see files which
> you take to be the executables, but they are not executable by your
> running system so it perfectly properly ignores them.
>
> >How is it possible to mix 32-bit and 64-bit if one follows the
> >installer's defaults?
>
> You tell us. The list I mentioned above might become the basis of a
> bug report, or it might be the answer to many of the questions, but at
> the moment I don't know if there's enough information for anyone to be
> able to replicate the issue and that's crucial.

I have two disks, one with an old Debian Wheezy, my working system, and
a new one on which I am trying to install Jessie 1.0.1. To facilitate
setup, on my old debian I had created a set of mount points
/mnt/devuan/... which fstab automatically mounts when I boot the old
debian. I wonder if this could somehow result in a mongrel 32-bit/64-bit
installation. When I try a new re-install of Devuan Jessie 1.0.1 later
and record exactly what I do, I'll first umount all these mount points
and comment their mounts in fstab.

Another anomaly is what when I boot the old devuan, the boot goes to
recovery mode despite what is selected in the GRUB menu. A control-D
continues the boot normally. It showed up only fairly recently. But
since I seldom reboot it, I didn't worry much about the issue. The two
disks are almost the same, one being a bit older than the other. My
Debian is on /dev/sdb and I'm installing to /dev/sda, I wonder whether
the mongrolized install might be not be some kind of cross over between
the two devices caused by BIOS.

> >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.
>
> It could be you've mixed architectures that way but it seems to me more
> likely that at some point you weren't running the executables that you
> thought you were running because you had more than one architecture on
> various operating systems lying around on the drives in your system.

Yes, that's the case. The problem is to figure out how they might
influence each other.

Haines