Have set up a wifi hotspot with debian and would like to repeat with devuan and hopefully less ram. Wifi dongle needs nonfree drivers. Everything works fine without any driver additions in devuan. Except a little workaround is needed: you must remove one of the two associated driver packages below (the other is firmware-misc-nonfree), and reconnect the wifi connection in the gnome network manager:

sudo apt remove firmware-zd1211

If you then try to install the same package,

sudo apt install firmware-zd1211

it says "Unable to locate package firmware-zd1211."

The package has just vanished! An apt update does not help. What is going on?

Have you by chance disabled the non-free repository section?

Didn't touch anything in /etc/apt/sources.list.

Just tried the previous version of devuan, ascii, with no changes at all. Same results. Here is some output (blank lines added for clarity):

root@devuan:/home/devuan# apt install firmware-zd1211
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
firmware-zd1211 is already the newest version (1:1.5-4).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 100 not upgraded.

root@devuan:/home/devuan# apt-get remove firmware-zd1211
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
firmware-zd1211
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 100 not upgraded.
After this operation, 66.6 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
(Reading database ... 100348 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing firmware-zd1211 (1:1.5-4) ...

root@devuan:/home/devuan# apt-get install firmware-zd1211
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package firmware-zd1211