mazzilius_marsti

Any distro would do, but for my case, it is Arch because I have more control over the partitions. I would like the OS, so root, swap and others on 1 drive. The /home should be on a separate drive. The tricky thing is to have everything encrypted, except /boot and /efi of course.

Now, here is what I can do

1. FDE on 1 drive. This is easy: you create /efi, /boot and then create a large LUKS partition. From there, you create LVM on that LUKS partition and get your: /, /home and swap. Then mount everything correctly and install.

In the grub config, you only need to set it so it knows the LUKS partitom and where the root is. For eg, if your LUKs partition is /dev/sda3, you do:

• cryptdevice=UUID=<uuid of the /dev/sda3>: cryptlvm rootfs=/dev/vg/root.

2. Unencrypted /home on another drive. This is like 1) but /home is mounted on a separate drive. Still need to do the grub config, but nothing is needed for /home. It is automatically mounted when you login.

Now for my case: Encrypt /home

The encryption and mount part is easy. But how to get the OS to recognize it? The Arch wiki has this weird thing where you create an encryption key, they called it home.key, using cryptsetup. You then store the key in /etc and then in your /etc/crypttab, you specifiy the drive with /home and location of the key. No need for any passphrase.

The problem I have with this is that keys are stored in root. So if my root system is corrupted, I cant even decrypt home....

Any advice is welcome..

Hey folks. I recently got an old X220 with an mSATA SSD. I plan to to install Linux on there. It doesnt matter which OS: Debian, Ubuntu or Arch. The machine is so old that all distros play nice with it.

Anyway, the speed on the mSATA is slower than the 2.5 SSD. So I want to know if is it possible to have your /boot, /efi, swap on the mSATA. Then, the /home on the 2.5 SSD? Any problems with this setup and if anyone tried it before?

Now, for the reasons why I use mSATA instead of just putting Linux on 2.5 SSD:

1. the mSATA is Samsung, pretty rare nowadays. The health is still very excellent. I checked with CrystalDiskInfo. So might as well use it.

2. My X220 has a problem finding out grub if installed on the 2.5 SSD. It's literally a 50/50 chance it can find grub properly. So:

a) you installed Linux on 2.5 SSD, reboot.

b) grub error screen

c) restart

d) boot into Linux well

Note at d) if I do anything to restart/shutdown the computer, you are back at step b) and require another reboot to reach Linux.

Any advice is welcome.

I have an older laptop so no need to worry about the stupid Modern Standby introduced in late 2019. What I want is a reliable way to lock screen when suspend, doesnt matter how bloat or minimal.

First, to make sure the laptop suspends when I close the lid:

• on some Distro, this works OOTB.
• If it doesnt, I check /etc/systemd/sleep.conf and set allow Suspend from there.

After this, laptop does suspend. Now here comes the trickiest part, how to make sure your screen stays locked? There are so many rabbit holes so I want some help.

Depending on your software selections, you can fall into 3 categories:

1. create some systemd script like this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Slock

Problem: sometimes the screen doesnt get locked, i.e. your slock doesnt get triggered. Even worse, in some cases, the desktop is briefly shown on resume, before the locker shows up.

2. use program like xss-lock, xautolock. Then links it with your locker and then autostart in your wm. Eg: i3wm with i3lock and xss-lock:

exec --no-startup-id xss-lock --transfer-sleep-lock -- i3lock

This works. But the laptop sometimes takes a while to suspend.

3. manually invoke "Lock" with a keystroke. Then close the lid. Apparently this works but I have to remember to manually "lock" every single time.

Thanks for any suggestions.

So I put all of my important dot files on Github. Whenever I need to reinstall stuff, I pull the files. To get this working, I need to do the "gh auth login" where it grants the ssh key. Or I can create a token for that specific machine on Github. This is a long list of letters/numbers that I then copy when doing "git clone".

During installations of Arch or even a minimal Debian, how do you do this? There are no browsers, so the command "gh auth login" would get stuck.

Is there a better way to do this, other than making the dotfiles repo public?