Prettify cryptsetup password prompt possible?

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1

Hey,

I’m working on a laptop setup with Manjaro Architect using a full disk encryption. As this is a setup for my better half, I would really like to prettify the cryptsetup password prompt. Searching for this did not bring up anything useful.

Is there a way to integrate this into a grub boot splash or something similar?

EDIT:
In the meantime I found Plymouth, that is supposed to do what I want. But unfortunately the Plymouth splash only appears after the password prompt.

As I’m currently testing this in a virtual box machine this might behave different on the target laptop.

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You will need to add plymouth to your initrd. Please read this Arch wiki article on the subject.

/etc/mkinitcpio.conf

HOOKS=(base udev plymouth ...)

Warning:

  • If you use hard drive encryption with the encrypt hook, you must replace the encrypt hook with plymouth-encrypt and add it after the plymouth hook in order to get to the TTY password prompts.

Read more - Arch Wiki Plymouth

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Be extra cautious, do it wrong and you’ll lock yourself up and would need to fix with live Manjaro and chrooting into the broken encrypted media.

4

Thx for the hint. I did as described in the Arch wiki and the splash does show up. But as I wrote in my first post, it only appears after the password prompt. I even added the graphics driver to initrd. Does not make a difference.

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I didn’t realize it was this you meant. I have never excelling in encrypting my system - sorry I didn’t get it the first time. I think it is due to the /boot being encrypted and thus not accessible until the passphrase has been entered.

I know there are several topics in the now archived forum. Maybe you can find something there https://archived.forum.manjaro.org.

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Update: I managed to get this working. The only difference I made with a new test installation was to mount and install grub to /boot instead of /boot/EFI.

So installing Plymouth and the Manjaro Plymouth Theme, then following the steps from Plymouth - ArchWiki. In case of my VirtualBox installation no kernel driver was needed to add to initrd.

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What about just prettifying the tui?

Here is something I threw together to illustrate my point:
image

This prompt can have all the same information, but it looks more like plymouth, warns about caps lock etc.

I reckon with some basic ascii art it would come pretty close, and be functionally the same.

Of course I do not know how easy it would be to implement, but I think it would be aesthetically leaps ahead and more appealing than what we have now