Preparing Fedora 26 laptop with ZFS and encryption — fedora (part 4)

Click on the “Install to hard Drive” to open up a wizard.

In this episode we will install fedora on the partitions we created in previous parts of this series.

Press Win key to open up the activity window and open installation wizard from the left menu — install to hard Drive .

Fedora installation wizard — Anaconda Installer.

Chose your language and click continue. Select time & date then click oninstallation destinationto select your disk.

Click on “installation destination”.

Select your drive and use “Custom” configuration then click “Done’

Select your drive and from Storage Configurationchoose custom to manually select partitions allocation. For two encrypted partitions you will need to provide your password which you used before to encrypt them.

Using the table below select the partition types.

Partition table for my 256G SSD drive.

For 20G partition:

• Decrypt using password you used before
• Format using XFS
• Use / mount point

For 1024MB partition:

• Format using XFS
• Use /boot mount point

For 256G partition

• Format using EFI System Partition
• Use /boot/efi mount point

Leave the fourth ~217.1G partition alone for now as ZFS is not available by default (because of the licence incompatibility issues between Linux kernel and ZFS) and we will install ZFS later on.

Even though ZFS is open source and free it’s license prohibits it being part of Linux kernel. If you want to use ZFS you have to install it yourself.

ZFS is not available by default because of licensing incompatibility.

Click Done and installator will warn you that you didn’t created a swap partition. With sufficient memory, I have 16G RAM , we don’t need swap. Ignore the message and click Done once again.

Ignore this and click “Done” once more.

Click “Accept Changes”.

Click “Accept Changes” and on next screen “Begin Installation”.

Click “Begin Installation”.

While Fedora is installing let’s setup root password and create our own user.

Add your user to administrators so you can use sudo.

Follow the convention where your user name is surname.lastname. Check the Make this user administartor which will add your user to wheel group so you can use sudo .

Click Finish configuration and then go to Network & Hostname and setup your hostname to something cool (like catnipmeadow) and then click Quit.

Reboot your laptop and remove your pendrive from the USB.

You should see a screen asking you for your disk encryption password you provided before (this is the password for the /dev/sda3 partition where we mounted / ).

After reboot type your disk encryption password.

After you provide valid decryption password you should see the login screen.

Log in and you have a running Fedora :)

What is missing is the decryption of the /dev/sda4 partition and the ZFS.

That’s all for this episode. Next we will use crypttab to automatically decrypt /dev/sda4 partition during OS boot in part 5.

This post is part of the series, for more check out:

• Part 1 — introduction https://medium.com/@AndrzejRehmann/preparing-fedora-laptop-with-zfs-and-encryption-part-1-f5788dda79ab
• Part 2 — partitions https://medium.com/@AndrzejRehmann/preparing-fedora-26-laptop-with-zfs-and-encryption-part-2-partitions-7b481f381c41
• Part 3 — encryption https://medium.com/@AndrzejRehmann/preparing-fedora-26-laptop-with-zfs-and-encryption-encryption-part-3-1c32f4c9c013
• Part 4 — fedora https://medium.com/@AndrzejRehmann/preparing-fedora-26-laptop-with-zfs-and-encryption-fedora-part-4-1fceb9c8428a
• Part 5 — encryption2 https://medium.com/@AndrzejRehmann/preparing-fedora-26-laptop-with-zfs-and-encryption-encryption2-part-5-fd98d688fc40
• Part 6— zfs https://medium.com/@AndrzejRehmann/preparing-fedora-26-laptop-with-zfs-and-encryption-zfs-part-5-1e17820b40a4