With regard to my "connection refused" failure
when starting xserver, leloft wrote:

> http://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=1590
>
> Worked for me four times out of four

The proposed solution was to append the line
"needs_root_rights=yes" to /etc/X11/Xwrapper.conf
This in itself did not solve the issue, however

    apt-get install xserver-org-legacy

did take care of things. (How nice to able to
highlight and paste text again! Probably there is
some way to do it in the console...)

Regarding security of xserver-org-legacy, according to an
LWN post linked at dev1galaxy.org, the setuid root is mainly
a problem when running remote X without going via ssh.

https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5499_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201312291830_-_x_security_-_ilja_van_sprundel

Unfortunately there are no valid links to the video
on X security.

The other issue I had was warnings related to
runsvdir-start. This was resolved by commenting out the
offending line in /etc/inittab.

runsvdir-start is typically a symlink to /etc/runit/2.
The runit package for devuan should provide this symlink,
since AFAICT the debian runit relies on systemd unit files.

thanks to all for your Xhelp,


--
Joel Roth