Thank you all for the advice regarding the Xserver problems. I am still not sure what happened here but following your advice and with some other ideas this worked.

Disable nouveau when booting press e add nouveau.modeset=0 press F10. This boots and allows me to log in.

ps -A | grep shows that startx, xinit and Xorg are not running so clearly a step in the right direction.

startx fails with no screens found and that it is using /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Renaming /etc/X11/xorg.conf to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak and trying again also fails with no screens found but now reports that it is using /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d

A quick look in there shows a file 20-nouveau.conf which identifies the video card as Nvidia and uses the nouveau driver. Renaming that to 20-nouveau.conf.bak and restarting the system brings everything up normally.

I have no idea what happened, what was wrong with these files or why renaming them worked. In fact not even sure what video drivers I am running right now. Much still to investigate.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Stripes

On Fri, 26 Apr 2019 at 01:41, Timothy Rice <timothy.rice@unimelb.edu.au> wrote:

Hi Stripes,

On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 08:49:48AM +0100, 'stripes theotoky' via mlug-au wrote:
> Following the latest update on my Devuan box I have lost the Xserver.
> <snip>

If you haven't checked /var/log/Xorg.0.log yet, you might want to check it
out.

What is your usual method of starting X? Eg do you rely on a login manager
such as slim, or do you set up an ~/.xinitrc and run startx? What's your
WM/DE?

If you've been relying on a login manager and/or a fullblown desktop
environment, you might find it easier to troubleshoot if you switch to the
startx method and launch a simple WM like openbox. How to do that is
covered at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xinit

~ Tim

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