On 6/18/25 12:51, David Niklas via Dng wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Jun 2025 12:00:01 +0000
> terryc <terryc@???> wrote:
>> On Sat, 14 Jun 2025 23:20:50 -0400
>> David Niklas via Dng <dng@???> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>> I went to install Devuan from scratch on my PC and I got an
>>> "installation step failed" error message when installing Daedalus.
>>> This occured after selecting that I wanted a desktop environment, but
>>> deselecting all of the choices as I wanted IceWM, which was not in
>>> the options.
>>>
>>> I ended up disabling the desktop enviroment option to get Devuan to
>>> install.
>>
>> My 2c is that isn't a bug and your response (back up, disable DE
>> selection and continue installing base system) is the correct solution.
>
> But then why even have a selection for desktop environment
> instead of just having a set of selections for DEs that you can install
> if you want them?
>
> That's one extra check box that does absolutely nothing and breaks the
> install process if selected without selecting a DE. Breaking something
> without a good reason is a bug, right?
>

Selecting desktop environment and deselecting one of the desktop
environments will install task-desktop along with its dependencies and
recommended packages.

The Recommends for task-desktop include the desktop environments, and xfce
is the first one in the list. That's the one you should get with the
selections you made. (I just did it to make sure it was true.)

The error message about a step failing is due to something else. Maybe you
caught a mirror while it was updating or maybe there was some temporary
network glitch.

The installer is mostly identical to debian's version of debian-installer.
You'd have to dig into some very old history to find their reasoning for
the desktop choices in tasksel.

fsmithred