Upgrading to Linux Mint 19, running the old system in a chroot

Background Archaeological findings have revealed that prehistoric humans buried their forefathers under the floor of their huts. Fast forward to 2018, yours truly decided to continue running the (ancient) Fedora 12 as a chroot when migrating to Linux Mint 19. That’s an eight years difference. While a lot of Linux users are happy to just [...]

fsck errors after shrinking an unmounted ext4 with resize2fs

Motivation I’m using resize2fs a lot to when backing up into a USB stick. The procedure is to create an image of an encrypted ext4 file system, and raw write it into the USB flash device. To save time writing to the USB stick the image is shrunk to its minimal size with resize2fs -M. [...]

tar –one-file-system diving into a bind-mounted directory

Using tar -c –one-file-system a lot for backing up large parts of my disk, I was surprised to note that it went straight into a large part that was bind-mounted into a subdirectory of the part I was backing up. To put it clear: tar –one-file-system doesn’t (always) detect bind mounts. Why? Let’s look, for [...]

Installing Linux Mint 19.1 with UEFI boot, RAID, encryption and LVM

Introduction These are my notes as I attempted to install Linux Mint 19.1 (Tara) on a machine with software RAID, full disk encryption (boot partitions excluded) and LVM. The thing is that the year is 2018, and the old MBR booting method is still available but not a good idea for a system that’s supposed [...]