[TriLUG] Booting LUKS

[Brian McCullough]

Back at the beginning of the month, I had a conversation with Alan
Porter about the issues when trying to boot multiple versions of Linux
and possibly other operating systems on a single machine.

Since then, I have discovered an interesting concept, and tool, called
dracut, which is intended to create a much smaller initial ramdisk, only
containing the drivers and other components necessary to give the kernel
access to the proper root file system.  Once that has been accomplished,
control transfers to the main system, and life goes on.

At least that's how I understand dracut.


On to the questions, at least the first couple.


Has anybody else encountered, and preferably used, dracut?

As far as I understand, this originally either came out of Red Hat, or
the Fedora Project, since most of the discussion that I have been
reading seems to be there.

I am trying to use it with an Ubuntu variant or two, and running into
issues.  The first one was a complaint about not being able to find the
"consolefonts," "consoletrans," "keymaps" and "unimaps," directories.

The message says: Directories consolefonts, consoletrans, keymaps,
unimaps not found.  Please inform us about the issue including your OS
name and version.

Whoever, "us" is, but it appears that it doesn't play properly in an
Ubuntu environment.

Following one thought, I simply disabled the "i18n" dracut module, which
was making this complaint, and that was solved, except....


Now, at least, I seem to get a good initramfs file, which I can boot to,
but, when it prompts for my LUKS password, it doesn't seem to read it,
perhaps a "readline" issue?  Or perhaps an issue with the "consolefonts,
etc." 

More particularly, it presents the prompt, writes some more messages to
the screen, and pauses.  I enter the appropriate password and hit Enter.

Nothing.

I can then type some more at the screen, and what I type is displayed.

I don't seem to be able to continue past that point.


Anybody with either experience or bright ideas?


Thanks,
Brian