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LUKS encryption, LVM and other installation options from Debian Installer?

Started by tester1, February 22, 2015, 10:48:24 PM

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tester1

Hello, I'm new to Sparky  Linux and testing Gameover 3.6 edition 64bit.
I have some experience in Debian, Ubuntu and some other Debian based distros.

I was able to install Gameover edition on VMware Player through the sparkylinux-installer gui  terminal command (the standard installer had some python error just before the partitioner step).
However, in the GUI installer I could not find some of the options that a standard Debian installer provides. The most important options  I could not find are:
- LUKS system encryption
- LVM
- option to have a separate boot partition (I created one through gparted but the GUI installer did not ask where to put boot files)
- option to install GRUB wherever possible, e.g. on the above mentioned boot partition
- option to specify reserved blocks percentage per partition

Are all these options not supported in Sparky or just hidden somewhere?

Also, there is another option I would like to ask about - when the target HDD is >2TB, in the standard Debian 7 installer one could make a small biosgrub partition in order to "trick" old mobos that cannot recognize the full size of such HDDs, install Debian and use the whole >2TB size.
I have not tested this as the virtual disk in my VMware is smaller, but is this supported in Sparky linux?

MoroS

The Python-based installer is a long story. To long to mention (and I'm still looking at alternatives). As for your questions:
- LUKS - for the time being Sparky doesn't support it; It's a quite exotic option to a common user, so it wasn't a priority.
- LVM - the installer doesn't support it; The current installers are simple scripts from other distros or projects and we needed something to fill the gap.
- separate boot partition - that's supported by the Python installer, although not specifically mentioned; You just create the partitions yourself and assign them mount points by right-clicking on them in the installer (/, /home, /boot, etc.). The sparkyinstaller-gui (the fallback installer, as I like to call it) doesn't have such options.
- GRUB installation - again the Python-based installer has that, but the fallback tries to do it on it's own.
- reserverd blocks - neither of the available installers supports it (see: exotic option ;) ).
- >2TB - I have no idea if this works... None of us has some much disk space. :(

Both installers come from different projects (the Python-based comes from Mint and the fallback is just remastersys modified by Pavroo). Answering your questions made me wonder about the sad state that the Sparky installer is in. I've been looking at an alternative for some time. It's called Calamares and it attracted a lot of attention lately (maybe you've read about it), but it'll still take some time to sort this whole mess out. For the time being we try to fix problems as they come. There's only two of us, so it takes some time.
There's no such thing as "impossible". :)


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