Linux Mint and whole disk encryption

[Michael Butash]

Ahh, now I see this once i get my pc usable again.  I may just try this 
depending on my last results today with Oneiric.  Mint doesn't sound 
suitable for power users yet if they're making hacks for 
encryption/raid, but at this point can't be any worse than ubuntu.

I have to say, after yesterday I'm pretty much done with Ubuntu.  It 
rather pains me to say it, but between simple quality of their releases, 
bonehead decisions, and Unity being the biggest boner of them all, it's 
really become simple crap to anyone that actually uses advance linux 
features.  Guess they only care about the "grandma with her netbook" 
market now.

Literally 6-8 hours of dealing with a bug in mdadm from natty (combo 
mobo/disks) that wouldn't allow my raid1 to be rebuilt upon boot.  I 
couldn't even use Oneiric boot because some genius wanted to save 10k of 
binary space in busybox and removed fdisk without putting something to 
replace it.  For manually aligning ssd's, parted is not sufficient (I 
think), so i had to fdisk from natty's boot cd.  Ugh!

Eight hours later, already past midnight I got Oneiric to boot stable, 
then adventures with Unity.  So unity is entirely broken for any 
multi-monitor support that uses more than one framebuffer, simply 
rendering a white screen, but can however get a generic xwindows cursor 
across it normally.  Nvidia twinview works as long as you don't need 
multiple twinviews (ati's equivalent i do however need), but I found 
(after the fact obviously) that a lot of people have issues with this, 
and there is no fix.  Does anyone at Canonical actually test 
multi-monitor support with this awful unity desktop?  Geezus!

I ended up installing kubuntu desktop around the 3am mark just to get it 
functional, and surprisingly it works pretty darn decent out of the box, 
using my ati card for all the desktop rendering goodies ala compiz. 
Getting used to KDE again is the trick more than anything as I've not 
used it in a good 5 years.  I'm not sure if im going to stay with 
kubuntu, or try gnome3 (i think g3 will be broken since unity relies on 
it anyways), or simply move to another distro.

I do know at this point I would recommend planning a move from Ubuntu 
beyond Natty.  Sadly Fedora seems the most supporting of features I want 
due to RH's involvement, maybe I'll try the darkside since ubuntu's fall 
from grace is picking up momentum.

-mb


On 11/26/2011 06:27 PM, Jim March wrote:
> Somebody has a whole-disk-encryption script that works in Mint!  I'm
> going to try it at some point soon myself.
>
> http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=69032
>
> It's been tested in Mint10 but that's still deep into the Ext4 era so,
> it ought to work?  I'm in the same boat, without whole disk encryption
> it's a no-go for me.
>
> Jim
>
> On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 6:11 PM, Michael Butash<michael at butash.net>  wrote:
>> You know, I read this thread about mint as I burn 11.10 to install on new
>> disks, and thought to grab Mint and give it a go, especially with fussless
>> gnome3 supposedly.  Then I remembered, I always need an ubuntu alt install
>> to do raid/luks/lvm stuff, and found they don't have an equivalent.
>>   Unfortunately it somewhat obsoletes them, at least for me.
>>
>> For those that don't mind lack of redundancy or disk encryption, game on for
>> Mint.  I'll just have to gut Unity on Oneric, but have all the goodies baked
>> into ubuntu...
>>
>> -mb
>>
>>
>> On 11/26/2011 01:38 PM, Jim March wrote:
>>>
>>> Mike, just a thought: Linux Mint 12 just officially shipped.  I
>>> suspect that would be a really nice setup for your new critter.
>>>
>>> Given your ATI/AMD video card, you want a pretty cutting edge
>>> distro...the latest Ubuntu or Mint 12 would do nicely.
>>>
>>> Jim
>>>
>>> On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 10:00 AM, Michael Havens<bmike1 at gmail.com>    wrote:
>>>>
>>>> its cool... the webcam and microphone just work in the new ubuntu. maybe
>>>> the
>>>> old one too but I didn't have one on my system.
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> :-)~MIKE~(-:
>>>>
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