Hello.

I have placed a pre-order at the slackware store for 13.37 and plan to do a clean install on my thinkpad (running 13.1 with encypted /home).

I am considering using a partition configuration which will be someting like:

sda1 /boot
sda2 extended
dev/xxx /swap encrypted
dev/yyy / encrypted
dev/zzz /home encrypted

I'll probably do it like suggested here:

http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackwar...ADME_CRYPT.TXT

I do have a couple of questions though:

1) Does anyone here use an encryption method that differs from the above-if so what are the advantages?

2) I'll be compiling my own kernel-is it strictly necessary to use an initrd if my kernel has lvm compiled into the kernel?

This method looks similar to what the Debian Installer uses. I
just selected to encrypt the disk and it created an unecrypted
/boot partition and it encrypted the rest of the disk.

If you compile your own kernel and you include all the right
drivers (such as lvm and dmcrpyt), you won't need an initrd.
Take a look at the output of lsmod to see if there are other
modules you might want to bake into the kernel.

Be sure that your kernel boots correctly before you remove
your current kernel from the boot menu!

1 members found this post helpful.

The initrd is required - not per se to contain kernel modules, but it has to contain the cryptsetup program plus a startup script that asks for your LUKS password so that the root filesystem can be unlocked before control over the system is handed over to the real Slackware "init".

That is what the mkinitrd program all takes care of for you.

Eric

4 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for the offer of help; partitioning in slackware is different to debian, so I don't think that this would work.

Best,

Kris

Hi Eric,

Thank you for your response. I'll make sure that I use mkinitrd when I do this!

Kind regards,

Kris

Thanks, Alien Bob. I learned something new.

a tip I would give you about lap tops is you never know when you will be with out your collection
of live cds or dvds installer disks what ever you use in a O/S disaster
I would suggest you have a back up installation on it's own partition that is not normaly mounted
with the data being kept on another partition mounted at every boot

so no matter badly messed up your normal installation your just a reboot from fixing it or carrying on
on your back up installation and fixing your normal installation later

1 members found this post helpful.

That's a good point. Generally I'm never without a usb live distro, so I should be ok.

Thanks