Today I installed Linux Mint 21 "Vanessa" Cinnamon edition on my Lenovo ThinkPad T460p. I purchased this T460p refurbished earlier this year and I had Linux Mint 20.3 MATE on this machine before the new installation today. I only had the MATE installation for evaluation and therefore no data to worry about before the installation. I have the Mint 20.3, Cinnamon and Xfce, respectively on other machines and wanted to explore MATE as well. I can use all three of them, but my decision now is to use Cinnamon as primary choice on a machine like this that can manage Cinnamon without ant problem. This machine is intended to be a daily driver, or almost daily driver.

Main characteristics of this machine:

  • Intel Core i7-6820HQ CPU @ 2.70 GHz, 4 cores, 8 logical threads
  • RAM 32 GB
  • SSD 1000 GB
  • Graphics Nvidia GeForce 940MX + Intel HD Graphics 530
  • Date code 16/12 (so manufactured 2016)

I prepared a 4 GB USB-stick as a bootable media already a few weeks ago. I had first downloaded the ISO image and verified the integrity and authenticity. All with Linux Mint web site as starting point.

I have installed Linux Mint several times before. However I am still uncertain when I do the installation process, although Linux Mint has a good step-by-step-installation.

I started the Live-USB-stick, in the Live-session and from there I went on to the installation. First time, I terminated the process. I thought I was stepping back before any installation had started. But apperently the old Linux Mint 20.3 MATE was already gone when I started again...

I preliminary want to have the entire SSD drive encrypted. Furthermore I want to have the home catalog on a separate partition. I plan to only have one operating system installed. It is here I get confused in the installation, how to both choose encryption and partitioning. I also consider the partition creation procedure in the installation is a unclear.

My installation today: I selected LVM (Logical Volume Management), a precondition to select encryption, which I also selected. Before this, I also selected to install multimedia codecs. In addition a couple of settings, like language.

This means that I installed without creating the separate partition for the home catalog. Nor did I create a swap partition.

In the installation process it looked to me as swap partition was going to be created automatically with my settings, but I cannot see any afterwards. Maybe swap was not created because system decided it was not necessary (32 GB RAM), or I have to look closer in eg GParted partition tool.

Is it possible to move /home to a separate partition post-installation? A swap-partition should be doable create post-installation. Now I will read and review what I want to do. Maybe I will run installation again, maybe not.

When Linux Mint boot, there are a lot of text scrolling before login, was so also with the 20.3 MATE installation. I wonder if any of this is important to fix, or possible to fix as it is annoying. Maybe I can figure out from forum discussions.

After installation and reboot, I installed all updates.

I also updated the grub-file (plus "sudo update-grub" command in the terminal), so the Grub menu is shown a few seconds at start up, due to my experience a few days ago: Login loop forever - how I break it.

The installation is fast, it takes only a few minutes on this machine. What take time is to decide what I want to do, and what alternative means. Also the update and upgrade of all packages after installation were completed within a few minutes.

Next is to review and ponder how I want to have my installation, like partitions and encryption. Maybe new installation Then it is time to configure drivers and change settings to be as I like them, etcetera. And let machine run to see how it works. When I am satisfied, it is time to install more software, copy data and use the machine more for real work.

The walk is ongoing.

Henrik Hemrin

28 August 2022

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