Simple question for you Debian users: I know this can be done by manually partitioning. I am thinking of giving Debian a try "bare metal" on one of my computers. Its a 7 Pro 64 bit legacy bios setup. I have tons of Macrium backups, so no fear if something goes bump in the night. I'll set the system disk at around 250 gig, leaving basically 250 Gig for Debian. Just doing a simple side by side install here, but I want Debian FDE (LVM with encryption 100%). I am certain the Debian installer will do an out of the box LVM with encryption for the whole device - BUT ---- that is not what I am doing. Does the installer offer a point and click for LVM with encryption if I am only using the remaining 250 Gig? If not, I'll have to refresh on partitioning. Figure one of you guys will know the answer.
Debian 8.1 comes with grub2 as an option so I may give triple boot a go! I want to try Cinnamon as a "family" OS because I like how it looks, but I am going to keep 7 Pro just in case I need windows for something. I will keep 200 Gig for an ultimate third LVM encrypted Debian for "hobby" stuff!
You have to do some manual partitioning. I think this can help you. The information is from 2011, but I don't think that is outdated.
I appreciate the attempt here. The current installer(s) is broken and I have tried Ubuntu and Debian. I am looking for a manual way to create this and playing with options. Using the whole device/drive would make this easy, but that is NOT what I want. I can easily manually create a working LVM on a 75 gig partition. Works perfectly and all mapping and stuff is flawless. Problem is I need the partition to be encrypted. Repeating; my unencrypted LVM linux system boots and is slick as can be. Nice even! Looking for ideas here fellow Linux code types: So I setup /boot (GParted) and of course thats child's play (500 meg). Then I use Gparted and create a 75 Gig lvm2 pv partition type for the lvm. My design is to be LVM on LUKS. Accordingly: (steps) Cryptsetup LUKS over whole 75 Gig partition. Done. Open the crypt and its there at /dev/mapper/lvm. Now I create the PV (sudo pvcreate dev/mapper/lvm) Now I create the VG (sudo vgcreate VG1 dev/mapper/lvm) then I create 3 logical volumes and start the installer with the LUKS crypt still open. Everything looks great at this point. Get to "something else" and then set all the mount points and format. Easy I thought. Install looked perfect EXCEPT it won't boot. Doesn't matter if I set the boot flag on the LUKS volume or not. I wonder why I can not get the encrypted LUKS volume to boot/popup during boot for the password to be entered? Clearly since the LUKS crypt is locked during boot the flags set on the logical volumes cannot be seen by /boot. Has to be something very basic I am missing. I may have to manually configure the whole thing. I was hoping the installer would handle the mount points and stuff since I had everything configured and open when I switched over to the installer. I was really surprised when this didn't work. Any ideas?
When Linux boots, it should prompt for a passphrase for any LUKS volume present. To see if a given LUKS volume is setup properly, boot with a Debian LiveCD, and see if you can mount it in Disk Utility. If that works, maybe there's something messed up in /etc/crypttab or /etc/fstab. In /etc/crypttab you should see something like... Code: md1_crypt UUID=... none luks In /etc/fstab you should see a line for /boot, and one for each of your LVM2 volumes (e.g., swap, / and /home). You might need to drop into initramfs, use cryptsetup luksOpen, and then use lvm "vgchange -a y" to activate the logical volumes.
I was just coming back in here to type about this. I found some great reading about UUID setting up/matching to bring it all up. I found several nice threads about it. Although I don't have the same application as the thread I am going to link, its still a great "picture" of what I need to do. Setting up the LVM on the LUKS crypt is pretty easy at this point. I will use steps 8 + on the link below and see if I can learn this stuff! http://askubuntu.com/questions/293028/how-can-i-install-ubuntu-encrypted-with-luks-with-dual-boot I have to say that I am really enjoying learning how the LVM structure works. I love the expandability and how LUKS hides it all when its not mounted. For my "hobby" computer I'll put /boot on a removable flash making it even slicker. This first test machine I'll leave /boot on the same disk and just keep experimenting. Later I am going to "test" the LUKS on LVM paradigm as well. I don't think that one is for me, but I want to learn both methods just to experience them first hand.
