ELILO with LUKS

January 15, 2018 (Last Modified: December 12, 2018)

ELILO with LUKS

LILO is the default bootloader, and it’s covered in slackdocs along with mkinitrd. The UEFI/GPT variant called ELILO is configured in an almost identical way, except that:

typing elilo does not configure it automatically - you must edit the elilo.conf file by hand.

Make an initrd.gz file:
```
sh /usr/share/mkinitrd/mkinitrd_command_generator.sh -l /boot/vmlinuz-generic
```
- this will produce a long, ugly output… you need to re-write verbatim everything inside the single quotes ' (e.g. mkinitrd -c ... /boot/initrd.gz) in your terminal prompt.
- hit enter and you’ll build an intrd.gz on /boot as indicated
I’ve found (at least with encrypted drives):
- the initrd.gz file needs to be placed here:
```
/boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/initrd.gz
```
- the desired kernel should be copied to the same place - I usually cp vmlinuz-generic
- thus, the elilo.conf (also in this location) can be edited once and left alone even after kernel updates:
```
image=vmlinuz-generic
    initrd=initrd.gz
    label=vmlinuz-generic
    read-only
    append="root=/dev/rootpartition vga=normal ro"
```
- I have had no problems with ELILO (old as it is) except with NVIDIA drivers. Using NVIDIA, after I launched an X graphical environment (i.e., my window manager), I was unable to return to a TTY, I had issues waking the device from sleep, and other problems. Using GRUB2 or rEFInd solved all of them. GRUB2 is included in the Slackware install iso.

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