Bye, bye Atlantis!
Yep, it was so long since last post that even the age of the space shuttles has ended. We'll miss them for sure.
And once again I have to recover an old post to reinstall the macbook because of yet another disk failure. This made me realize that:
- Hitachi disks are crap :-P but unfortunately there's the only 7 mm SATA disks available right now here on online shops (bigger ones have gone 9.5 mm thick, not suitable for this macbook).
- Since two years ago price has dropped 40% for the same size :-)
- SSDs are still too expensive for mere mortals, unless you want to sacrifice a lot of space.
Instead the good'n'old Lenny, this time I used the latest point release for Squeeze, 6.0.2, which has been released a couple of weeks ago. The basics of installing Debian on the macbook with MacOS X and an encrypted root partition are still the same:
- Make all partitions with the MacOS installer diskutil: one for MacOS X (~30 GiB), other for /boot (~4 GiB) and the rest for Debian's root (~260 GiB). The later ones formatted as Unix filesystem, never empty space. These will be /dev/sda2, /dev/sda3 and /dev/sda4 because /dev/sda1 is already used by the EFI partition.
- Customize the MacOS X Tiger install so it install a minimal system (~5 GiB) from the first DVD. I don't have a band in my garage (there's just room for the car), neither want a Office or iWorks trial wasting space. In addition this makes this part much faster, and future upgrades to Leopard too!
- Install rEFIt on MacOS X and reboot to see it works and boots MacOS X.
- Boot into Squeeze installer CD/DVD (press 'C' for a while after the macbook startup ta-dah sound), setup partitions /boot and / on a encrypted volume, and install a minimal system (will be overwritten again, so no need to waste time installing).
- The Debian wiki's theory is to install everything but the bootloader, which I followed.
- The next is to reboot, enter rEFIt disk partitioning tool and synchronize the MBR with GPT.
- The installer doesn't recognize the encrypted partition, so I had to setup it again, exactly the same as before and reinstall the system and now the GRUB bootloader into /dev/sda3.
- Unfortunately here, due my excessive minimalistic second installation, I ended with a bootable system, but without root password or any other user.
- Fortunately the Squeeze DVD has a rescue mode in the main menu (after rebooting), which is able to mount the encrypted partition and drop you to a root shell there, so everything can be fixed and even run tasksel to install the rest of the system. Of course this is not the recommended method ;-) but works in case of need.
There's no swap partition in this schema. Instead part of the /boot space is there to create a 2 GiB swap file. There's no difference with 2.6 kernels in running the swap on a file or on a disk partition.
Last step is to speed-up boot time by blessing the boot partition from MacOS X. Figure out the partition name with disktutil list:
/dev/disk0 #: type name size identifier 0: GUID_partition_scheme *298.1 GB disk0 1: EFI 200.0 MB disk0s1 2: Apple_HFS MACOSX 29.9 GB disk0s2 3: EFI 3.9 GB disk0s3 4: Microsoft Basic Data 263.8 GB disk0s4
And then sudo bless --device /dev/disk0s3 --setBoot --legacy --verbose, if your boot partition is the third like mine.
Funny to see the encrypted partition appear as MS data under MacOS X :-)