So, my system was deteriorating, as it always happens, so I wanted to reinstall it. I also wanted to encrypt the new installation (the previous one wasn’t) and, something new for me, I wanted to put /home on a separate partition on a separate drive to make future reinstalls easier (hopefully anyway, not sure how things will go when Plasma 6 comes out, lol). Unfortunately, not only did I have to learn from the EndeavourOS website that the current Calamares version is busted (excuse me, but what the fuck?), but also I found much less information on how to do manual partitioning nowadays, and I’m quite confused about that last bit in particular.
So I came to kindly ask for a quick refresher on how to do the manual partitioning, preferrably through plasma-disks, but gparted is also fine if it’s necessary.
In case that matters, I intend to use BTRFS with LUKS encryption on both the root SSD and the home SSD.
What really confuses me about this matter is that I can find much less information on which flags to set, which, as far as I can recall from last time, was actually a pretty important part. I mean, hell, I had to use gparted to set some flags for I think the bootloader partition? back then because plasma-disks didn’t show the relevant flags. Now, literally the only thing I could find from what appears to be up-to-date sources is that the bootloader partition needs the boot flag. I’m also confused about what to tell Calamares to mount where, because apparently the /boot/efi entry is gone.
If there is an up-to-date guide for this anywhere at all, I do apologise for not finding it. I’m frankly rather terrible at searching the web for texts, and not particularly competent with search engines in general. If there is anything that goes through this on the EndeavourOS site, I do not know how I didn’t find it. If there isn’t, then I do wonder why that is the case.
If you are doing an EFI install, the only partition that needs any flags is the EFI partition itself. For systemd-boot, this will be mounted at /efi and for grub it will be mounted at /boot/efi.
The problem with telling you which flags to use is that every tool uses different naming. It will generally be either boot or esp.
Oooooh, so switching from grub to systemd is causing /boot/efi to be gone, that makes sense, gotcha.
Okay, so
well, first, to be clear, I want my 1 TB NVMe drive to be the system drive and my 512 GB SATA SSD to be the home drive
FAT32 partition with mountpoint /efi on NVMe with boot or esp flag set, whatever it may be called
BTRFS partition with mountpoint / on NVMe
BTRFS partition with mountpoint /home on SATA SSD
Both BTRFS partitions encrypted with LUKS, but that shouldn’t require me to do anything extra in Calamares if I set that up with plasma-disks
Don’t try to create the luks partitions outside of calamares.
It is better to let Calamares create the luks partitions. Basically, in manual partitioning, choose btrfs for those partitions and check the format and encrypt checkboxes.
In truth, there is no reason to create any of the partitions in plasma-disks or another tool.
Don’t try to create the luks partitions outside of calamares.
Why is that?
In truth, there is no reason to create any of the partitions in plasma-disks or another tool.
Well… ugh, I swear I read no longer than a few hours ago that Calamares had very important bugs, including that it doesn’t currently work well with LUKS encryption.
I’m looking for it. If you are entirely unaware of it, I invite you to help with that as well, if you would be so generous. I will edit this post as soon as I find it. If you know more about this than I do, I would gladly be correct.
Because that is how Calamares works. It may be possible to create the partitions outside of Calamares, unlock them outside of the installer and then point Calamares to the unlocked partitions and have it work but I have not tested that. Either way, it is definitely not easier to do it that way.
I am not aware of any current Calamares bugs that relate to luks encryption. I have done many successful installs with luks.
I can’t re-find the Calamares thing for my life, bloody hell.
Okay then. I’m just gonna have to trust you on this, I’ll try it then. Boot up Calamares on live ISO, create and encrypt the BTRFS partitions that I’ve described and create the FAT32 partition as I’ve described, all within Calamares.
I’ll report back after installing. I appreciate your help.
(I will add that I’m shredding my drives right now, btw, so I’m gonna need a hot minute, heh)
(I will add that I’m shredding my drives right now, btw, so I’m gonna need a hot minute, heh)
Man. Well, that took a fucking day and a half, didn’t it?
Anyway, it appears that things went just fine. Didn’t encrypt the root drive, after all, figured it’s not gonna be all too necessary and more of a hassle than it’s worth, but either way, my system is working now pretty much exactly as I intended.