Hello Marc,

You may have an old funky config left over from ASCII/stretch. I'd
invite you to consult the logs (/var/log) to see how Xorg is failing,
and at the same time checkout /etc/X11 to make sure everything is
"standard". Xorg is supposed to be started by your login manager (slim,
gdm, ...), which will as root. What you may have encountered is that
Xorg, as a user process, do not have the proper rights to use specific
paths and then fails.

As it is we know as much as you tell us: Xorg fails to start after
upgrade to Beowulf. Without more information, we'll be unable to help
further.

You could chose to go for the nuclear option: remove anything Xorg
related and then manually remove all left over files in the relevant
directories.

Ludovic

On 22/09/20 04:36, Marc Shapiro via Dng wrote:
> I have pretty much decided that there is no way to upgrade my Debian
> system to Buster and keep it usable without systemd.  Since I am set up
> for multiboot, including Devuan Ascii, I decided to upgrade that to
> Beowulf and see if that will work for me and the others using this box.
>
> After upgrading (following the instructions for upgrading an existing
> Devuan system), I rebooted the computer.
>
> First, I booted into my Debian Stretch partition to make sure that
> everything was still good, there.  Boot, login, start Xorg. All looks good.
>
> Logout and reboot into Beowulf.
>
> Boot and login went fine.  Starting Xorg, not so well.  Tried all three
> users with no luck.  This worked before the upgrade.  Tried as root. 
> Success!  So root can start Xorg, but not an ordinary user.  Any ideas
> what might be wrong.  It looks like a permissions issue, but I don't
> know enough about how X actually starts up to know where to look. 
> Anything that you want me to post to help debug this?
>
> Any help appreciated.
>
>
> Marc
>
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