hello Joel,

thanks for your reply. I have moved on to Salix, which, unlike its
Slackware parent, has apt-like dependency resolution and is as [un]reliable
as any of the non-systemd distros that I have evaluated/used on my travels.

Suffice to say that I have tried different devuan-based distros, and
compiled my own recent module-free, custom kernel - nothing I tried
worked. Since this matter was registered as a bug/issue with the devuan
project, I received little feedback. When my 6th-gen intel boxes start to
die and be replaced by amd/arm [losing faith in intel], I may give devuan
another try.

JackSprat

ps: I have never been sucessful in getting a vesa driver to work, either
with a template /etc/X11/xorg.conf or fragments in xorg.conf.d/.