Sorry to be so accident prone (the reason may be that I'm nearly a
nonagenarian).

I finally had success installing on a SSD by first running fsck on the
drive.

I proceeded to break out /opt, /var and /tmp directories from the
installation. Things seems to go smootly (at least # mount -a produced
no errors). But when I booted, there was a kernal panic. Could not
load the shared library lippcre2-8.

Booting to rescue mode also ends in kernal panic.

I tried to run # ldconfig on the drive from a booted Devuan-Live
terminal, but don't know how to do it. I assume the ldconfig command
reqires that the SSD partitions be mounted.

--
Haines Brown