July 17, 2021
andy
Installing a new laptop
‘New’ is a 2nd hand Thinkpad T470p laptop that I intend to duel boot with windows.
I have been a Debian user for over 20 years, I use windows at work for the proprietary EDA ‘Altium’, but I have never had a windows installation on my laptop. This machine will to be different – it is the first laptop that I have owned that has sufficient GPU to realistically run Altium.. I will try it in a VM later (if that works it will be my preferred choice), but for now I want to try a duel boot system.
So where to start?
Step one Debian wiki…
https://wiki.debian.org/DimentionedDualBoot/Windows
My laptop was purchased from a dealer / refurbisher. This means that they had confirmed that the hardware was functional, wiped it down and then installed a ‘clean’ copy of Windows on the whole system. What it doesn’t mean is that the system was set for UEFI boot and that the EFI partition is set correctly….
I turned on UEFI and made sure that Legacy BIOS mode was disabled.
Next I re-installed Windows, making sure to leave enough disk space for may later Debian install. (if you already have UEFI / secure boot enabled then you could skip the reinstall and instead re-size your disk)
Eeew! Windows now wants to show me adverts, it doesn’t give me the option to never show me ads, but at least I could insist that it doesn’t display tailored ads based on the obvious snooping of my web browsing habits – just another reason to use Debian.
Now to install Debian…
I want an encrypted file system, and because I want to dual boot I can’t just follow the guided installation in the Debian installer. So I shall detail what I did here. Indeed I took several attempts at this and eventually asked for help as I had still messed up (I thought I was doing it correctly but had missed out a step)
First the boiler plate DI
- Download your prefered Debian installation media (I am using Bullseye AMD64 netinst beta), and drop this directly onto a USB memory stick (dd)
- Put the USB stick in the laptop and select this as the boot device (on my thinkpad the boot device menu is F12)
- I chose the graphical installation option, but only because it was less key strokes to select
- Select your prefered Locale
- UI language (English)
- Enter your location (United Kingdom)
- …and keyboard layout (British English)
- Next DI comes up with a whole host of missing firmware for the detected WiFi – I can safely ignore this as I have a network cable plugged in (select No). If I want to enable WiFi I could choose to add media with the firmware at this stage or add it later.
- I have a network cable plugged in and DI finds and configures my network setup (IPv6 and v4 with DHCP)
- I enter a hostname (I chose to name my machines after lizards – this will be called skink)
- I am asked for a domain name (I have koipond.org.uk configured)
- You are then asked for some account details
- I do not enter a root password as I want the root account login disabled
- But I do provide my details for a user account
Now for the interesting bit – Partitioning the disk(s)
Select MANUAL disk partitioning…
I have the following partitions:
/dev/nvmen0p1
1.0MB FREE SPACE
#1 536.9 MB B K ESP
400.0 GB FREE SPACE
#3 16.8 MB Microsoft reserved partition
#4 111.6 GB ntfs Basic data partition
335.4 kB FREE SPACE
- Create an partition for /boot
- Select the 400GB free space
- Create a new partition
- Enter enough space of /boot (>100MB I select 500 MB)
- place this at the beginning of the disk
- Name it (boot)
- Use as ext2 – we don’t want journaling here
- Mount point – /boot
- Set up encrypted volumes
- We need to write the new partition table to disk before we can continue
- Create encrypted volumes
- select the large remaining area of free space
- name it (skink)
- write disk configuration
- finish
- let the system overwrite the partition with random
- enter a passphrase for the disk
- Set up LVM (inside the encrypted volume)
- Select Configure Logical Volume Manager
- Write changes to disk (we do this a lot)
- Create volume group
- Give it a name (VG-Skink)
- Select the encrypted partition
- Create logical volume (swap)
- Select the volume group to use (VG-Skink)
- Enter a name (LV-Swap)
- Enter size of swap (32G)
- Create logical volume (system)
- Select the volume group to use (VG-Skink)
- Enter a name (LV-System)
- Enter size of swap (remaining space)
- Finish
Set use
- Select your LVM VG for swap
- Use as: Swap area
- Done Setting up partition
- Select your LVM VG for system
- Use as: Ext4 journaling file system
- Mount point: / – the root filing system
- Mount options: I select ‘discard’ (trim function as this makes a considerable improvement to the disk performance and life)
I now have the following partitions:
LVM VG VG-Skink
#1 32 GB f swap swap
LVM VG VG-System
#1 367.5 GB f ext4 /
Encrypted volume
#1 399.5 GB K lvm
/dev/nvmen0p1
1.0MB FREE SPACE
#1 536.9 MB B K ESP
#2 500.2 MB F ext2 /boot
#5 399.2 GB K crypto skink
#3 16.8 MB Microsoft reserved partition
#4 111.6 GB ntfs Basic data partition
335.4 kB FREE SPACE
- Finish partitioning and write changes to disk
- Write the changes to disk
Boiler plate debian install continues
The system will install a base system
- Configure package manager – Select nearest mirror (I run a local mirror so select enter information manually)
- Yes I do want to take part in “popcon” (Debian uses this as a guide to how many instances of each package are installed – I select this for anything other than test installs)
- Software Selection
- I will have a desktop environment and I currently use KDE
- I would like an ssh server to be installed
- I want the standard system utilities
Sit back and wait a for the system to install…
Well that didn’t take very long – Damn this new laptop is quick. I suspect that is nvme solid state storage, no longer limited to SATA bus speeds (and even that wasn’t slow)