tomscharbach and Nolan, many thanks for your help.
tomscharbach: The first five questions all are yes. Question 6 is no.
For some reason, there are only two partitions. /dev/sda1 is 512 MiB in fat23. /dev/sda2 is the rest of the disk, formatted in ext4.
There is no separate graphics card in the system.
Net access is via an ethernet connection to the motherboard.
I tried installing Solus without LVM. No change.
I am down to deleting the partitions using gparted in the live version of Solus.
.....
The disk is now minus partitions. Installation still hangs at the same place.
Early in the live boot process, the screen flashes ten lines of numbers, 8.xxxxxx, each followed by "kum: disabled by bios." Does that seem relevant?
If not, would it be fair to conclude at this point that there is something about this system that Solus just doesn't like?