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I wrote a Guide on how to install Arch Linux with BTRFS and (almost) Full Disk encrytion

How to Setup Arch Linux With Btrfs and (almost) Full Disk Encrytion

https://veprogames.github.io/posts/how-to-setup-arch-linux-with-btrfs-and-fde/

This covers obtaining the ISO, connecting to Wi-Fi, partitioning, formatting, mounting, installing, setting up encryption and installing GRUB, in one article. Also includes some tips, like quickly mounting from install medium. Maybe this helps someone.

19 comments

WheelcharArtist

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with GRUB you can go full disk encryption
why should i use your guide of instead of the wiki?

vepro

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I wrote this more or less for fun; it is slightly more extensive than the installation guide geared for a more advanced setup. The wiki is mentioned in the article as well and is encouraged to be used too

refurbishedrefurbisher

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AFAIK GRUB itself cannot be encrypted.

vepro

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The Bootloader itself cannot be encrypted afaik, but the Kernel and initrd can reside on a LUKS Volume (GRUB_USE_CRYPTODISK). But, in order to prevent having to input your passphrase twice, you need to use a keyfile, and I have no experience with that, so I have gone another route. I don't think that a kernel and initrd necessarily need to be encrypted

g7s

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Honestly, the best thing I learned was: Need to fix your system through the install medium? Save yourself keystrokes of mounting by just mounting the root subvolume (to /mnt) and then type: mount -aT /mnt/etc/fstab --target-prefix /mnt. This reads your fstab and mounts everything for you.

Thank you so much for it :D

housepanther

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With btrfs and zfs virtually being neck and neck in terms of capabilities, is there a reason or application where one should be chosen over the other?

evadzs

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I use BTRFS for the Snapper backup/bootable snapshots

refurbishedrefurbisher

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BTRFS is included in the kernel and due to licensing issues, ZFS is distributed as a DKMS module that takes forever to build.

axzxc1236

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Less likely to break when you perform kernel upgrade. (new major version)

vojel

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Google ZFS licensing and you know why choose btrfs over zfs

housepanther

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Okay, so it came down to a licensing issue rather than one that is technical. I can definitely get behind that as somebody that will always value true open source, even when then the proprietary solution might be the better one in the short term. Something that is open source can only get better.

vepro

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In the Gentoo wiki it is also mentioned that "While it is true that Btrfs is still considered experimental and is growing in stability, the time when Btrfs will become the default filesystem for Linux systems is getting closer.". I don't know how many distros out there use Btrfs by default (never distrohopped), but it seems to become much more widely adopted than zfs.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Btrfs#Features

Molecular0079

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The biggest problem I have with full disk encryption is that there's still no way to include /boot into the BTRFS root partition for snapshotting. Having your kernel images separate from your system snapshots makes rolling back massively painful.

vepro

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You might install an older kernel version from /var/cache/pacman/pkg and then regenerate the initramfs. If not using NVIDIA, it's very easy to have multiple kernels installed (e. g. linux, linux-lts) to have another option if one kernel causes trouble.

I'd generally recommend having the lts or mainline kernel additionally if you use custom kernels, like zen or self compiled

wviana

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Nice birds part. Where did you learned that?

vepro

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What do you mean with "birds part"? Learned from YouTube Videos, Arch Wiki, and experimenting on bare metal and in Virtualbox. Hardest part for me when installing Arch 1st time was partitioning and bootloaders

wviana

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Sorry. It should be BTRFS

vepro

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It was from a GitHub Gist but idk which exactly it was, there are multiple. Keep in mind some files need to have copy-on-write deactivated (swapfile, VirtualBox disk images). The Arch Wiki mentions when copy-on-write should be turned off for a file