Installation on laptop failed (again): Hook 'openswap' cannot be found

Issues & Assistance
1

Today, I was finally willing to completely wipe my laptop and start with Cachy on that machine.

But alas, Calamares failed once again:

although it actually created all the partitions as it should and also started copying files.

I believe the interesting error message is:

Hook ‘openswap’ cannot be found

I checked the ISO’s sha256 checksum and also verified the signature, so I would rule a malformed ISO out.

Did I just lose my (old but stable) TuxedoOS in vain or is there any change to get Cachy running on this lappy?

2

I believe (but haven’t checked) that if you enable zram (at the partitioning step?) , then the openswap hook doesn’t get added.

3

What I did was to create a swap partition (just in case I need it), but I haven’t seen any button to enable zram.

Edit: oh yeah and I checked the “Encrypt” checkbox for the swap partition (I think). Openswap has something to do with whta, right?

Is there a way to save this installation somehow? Or do I have to restart? And was it wrong to create an encryptes swap partition?

4

The installer should take care of creating the swap, I believe. Pretty sure the swap also shouldn’t be encrypted. Maybe check this guide out? Not sure if it’s relevant, but regardless, I’d forego the preparatory steps and let the installer do its thing. The cleaner the slate, the easier it is to diagnose, in most cases. Oh, and secure boot and CSM should be disabled when installing.

5

That is weird, because it was Calamares itself that told me an unencrypted swap with encrypted hard disks is not a good setup and I should please go back and encrypt swap, too :thinking:

Thanks for the guide, will read this, but I guess the installation will have to wait 'til another day.

Edit: I thought I had done such an installation already twice in a VM without manually tinkering at all, but maybe I did not choose to encrypt the swap :thinking: can’t look it up, tough, because the VMs were on that hard drive i just formatted :smile:

6

welp, I tried the installation again, this time without creating swap partition at all. Calamares started, ran for a while and… just quit without any error or log. Of course that installation didn’t boot at all, I could not even manually mount the LUKSed drives.

That was when I re-cloned my Tuxedo OS onto the machine. I’m starting to believe that this laptop and Cachy just won’t go together. Which is a pity, because I’m beginning to loathe Ubuntu derivates just for the fact that I can’t regularly get an up-to-date tldr (and no, tldr as flatpak is not an option) :frowning:

7

Is there a specific need for encryption? I have never used it, so I can’t be of much help in that regard. Encrypting the swap is odd, but again, since I haven’t used encryption I can’t say for certain what is and is not normal.

Since you didn’t mention it specifically, did you install with Secure Boot and CSM disabled in the BIOS? That’s really the only thing I can think of. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable is able to chime in.

8

It’s a laptop, taken everywhere. May very well fall into the wrong hands and then I don’t want anyone to just be able to read everything on it.

Is it? Not when you think someone might just nick the device. An unencrypted swap would contain lots of the things in memory, right? Which might be half of my current browsing session.

Both are disabled. The machine currently runs Tuxedo and when I installed that, I wanted it to “just work” 'cos I was busy fleeing Windows 10/11 and needed a “quick” alternative.

9

Good point, actually. I keep thinking that it might cause issues for every partition to be encrypted, but of course, what would be the point of security if it isn’t on the whole thing. My bad for being so dense.

Had another look at the log. It might just be a case of openswap never being installed despite the hook? Not sure why that would be, I don’t remember much of the installation process, but maybe you can add the mkinitcpio-openswap package to pacstrap somewhere? Or maybe it’s possible to choose that package at some point in the installation process?

11

I tried manually installing openswap by chrooting into the installation. Didn’t help, the machine was never able to even boot that installation. Then re-installed Cachy, rid rule without a swap partition, that time the installer just quit at around 30%.

I give up. I will try Eendeavour and/or Garuda instead.

12

I recommend doing what you did before, and keeping the encrypted swap. I’ll have to confirm in my system, but looked around the live USB in a VM, and I believe you can just add mkinitcpio-openswap to the /etc/calamares/modules/pacstrap.conf and it should install. Chrooting just kind of leaves you with a mess, so not surprising if that didn’t work.

13

does this laptop have a wuestionable wifi adapter?

You could also try the cli installer.

14 
inxi -N                                                                                   
Network:
  Device-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8211/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet
    driver: r8169
  Device-2: Intel Wi-Fi 5 Wireless-AC 9x6x [Thunder Peak] driver: iwlwifi

Is that questionable? :wink:

15

I could try that. Although I find it rather questionable if that is missing, because how should such an installation ever work?

I just wanted to give Endeavour a shot, but maybe I’ll really try that first.

16

Just another thought, install Arch using the cli installer then convert to cachy, though it sounds like too much of a faff to me.

17

In my VM, installing with encryption was no issue, granted I didn’t bother with manual partitioning and just went with erase. Of course, a VM is different from a real system, but frankly I’m not knowledgeable enough to be able to say what the issue might be. In theory, things should work.

18

Yep, I tried it twice in VirtualBox beforehand, too. Even with manual partitioning and all. That’s why I thought I’d get it done easily. But now I failed twice on the bare metal, so it stands 2:2 for now :neutral_face:

19

Yeah no, thanks for the idea but I got a life to live, y’know :laughing: If the installer can’t do it, then I can’t do it. That much of user-friendlyness is the least I expect from an OS and that is why I fell in love with Cachy in the first place: it basically Just Worked™ :grin: At least on my PC.

This laptop seems to be a different beast, though.

I’m really considering Endeavour just to see if that would do the trick. Now that I know that my cloned-to-disk backup actually works, I am open for experiments. Although I’d prefer to have the same system on both machines, 'cos it means less brain work for me.

Edit: typos.