Hi, I'm Joseph!
A few of you met me once Free Geek before the time of the covidium, all those
centuries ago. I'm obviously highly social because I've been using Linux since
1997, living in Portland since 2010, and I subscribed to the plug lists …
today! I was a long-time Debianite until I started helping out at Free Geek,
which kinda caused me to take closer looks at Mint.
I like Mint. I now use Mint.
It's up to date enough where it matters to _work properly_ on my hardware, but
I don't have to deal with the random breakages of Debian sid (or Arch or
Manjaro or any rolling release, I know, I've used them…) and basically I'm in
favor of some level of laziness.
The problem: It won't install itself on my hardware. I said it won't install
itself, not that I didn't force the issue. 😁
I use LUKS. And LVM. The Mint installer as of 19.3 through 20.1 just cannot
cope with that. What you have to do is create your partitions before running
the installer, then decline the option to reboot and perform a boot repair on
the spot.
So:
- Create your EFI ESP, /boot, and a bunch of type 8309 partitions. (or skip the
ESP and use type 83 for MBR…)
- cryptsetup luksFormat all the 8309 partition blobs you have.
- cryptsetup luksUUID the partitions to write your crypttab. Here's mine, which
is probably more complicated than yours:
# system
rocket00crypt00 UUID="d<uuid>0" none luks,discard,keyscript=decrypt_keyctl
rocket00cryot01 UUID="a<uuid>a" none luks,discard,keyscript=decrypt_keyctl
# /srv
seagate00crypt00 UUID="a<uuid>f" none luks,discard,keyscript=decrypt_keyctl
seagate01crypt00 UUID="8<uuid>8" none luks,discard,keyscript=decrypt_keyctl
seagate02crypt00 UUID="0<uuid>d" none luks,discard,keyscript=decrypt_keyctl
seagate03crypt00 UUID="8<uuid>0" none luks,discard,keyscript=decrypt_keyctl
Always use UUIDs, even for NVMe. Those CAN change. And the keyscript lets me
use one passphrase for all drives. No keyfiles to risk losing.
- luksOpen your devices. You get to type all those passphrases this once unless
someone knows of an easy way to "mount -a" a crypttab?
- Create your LVM setup: pvcreate all the LUKS devices, vgcreate at least one
VG (I have /srv on its own), and then set up your LVs with whatever redundancy,
caching, whatever you like. This isn't a tutorial on LVM, sorry.
- Now run the installer and Something else the "How do you want to do this?"
for slicing and dicing your drive(s). If you didn't do all of the above, the
Something else screen wouldn't give you the option to create LVM setups unless
there are PVs, VGs, and at least one LV in each VG you want the Mint installer
to see, strangely. At that point may as well create the rest yourself.
- Install but DO NOT REBOOT!
- Make sure everyting for your new system is mounted. Don't forget /boot and
/boot/efi, I think the latter won't be on /target.
- Bind mount … /dev/ /sys /run /proc into your mounted system.
- Get the UUIDs of all your partitions and edit /etc/fstab for them. (I do use
/dev/aki00/root, /dev/aki00/home, etc. because those aren't likely to change,
but they CAN be changed. When in doubt, UUID it out!) Remember, you're editing
like /target/etc/fstab here, not the live USB's fstab!
- Copy the crypttab you created earlier to /etc/crypttab. I said before I don't
have a command to "mount -a" the contents of crypttab, but … I create it before
luksOpen so I don't suddenly decide to change the names of things at this
stage. Renaming devices is a pain in the rear at this stage. If you don't have
to, don't.
- chroot in: sudo chroot /target /bin/bash
- Make sure your LUKS devices show under /dev/mapper.
- Run vgscan. This might be superstition, but when I was figuring all of this
out, it didn't work when I didn't, and I always do now.
- update-initramfs -u -k all
- update-grub (This may also not actually be required.)
That should be it. Shut down the live USB, remove it when it tells you to,
press Enter, and … it should boot, it should ask you for a passphrase (only one
if you set it up like I did). If you don't have Plymouth installed, the
passphrase prompt kinda gets overwritten by other messages spat out by the
kernel, but Mint's Plymouth theme properly and cleanly asks for it in a nice
GUI.
The above offered in case someone might find it useful for something. I see a
thread ongoing about frustrating issues with Linux md and NVMe devices over
Thunderbolt. Remember when I said NVMe drives can move? Thunderbolt is one
thing that can cause that to happen. The other way is rearranging, adding, or
removing PCIe devices, but since Thunderbolt is PCIe hotplug on some level…
yeah.
So, um, hi! 🙂
Joseph
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