The forthcoming Ubuntu release, 7.10, the Gutsy Gibbon, is scheduled for release next month, 10/18. I recently tried installing it, and quickly encountered this bug, reported as fixed yesterday.

Ubuntu had inherited from Debian a problem whereby network interfaces’ names can be inconsistent from one reboot to the next. The installer identified my mobo’s wired network interface as eth1. On rebooting, the OS decided it was eth2, but /etc/network/interfaces had been configured to use the (now non-existent) eth1, hence no network.

In days’ past, I’ve used /etc/iftab to ensure it didn’t recur, but, apparently, as of Gutsy, this approach is deprecated, and the shiny new method is to use udev.

I then spent much time bashing my head against trying to arrange to boot into an encrypted root filesystem within an LVM2 logical volume on an encrypted LUKS partition, similar to this but using yaird to create the boot image. This is something I’ve done in the current Ubuntu release, Feisty. But I ran into a couple of bugs in Gutsy’s yaird package. (The trivial one also existed in Feisty, but I didn’t report it then.)

It’d be nice if Ubuntu offered an encrypted root installation option like Debian Etch, but I’d probably want enough things different from any set of options offered to end up doing it manually anyway.

I’m pretty sure I know how to fix the problem now. But I haven’t had the time to take another crack at it, so my first look has been stalled here.

Maybe when I’m done, I’ll write yet another encrypted root howto.