A workaround for installing Trisquel on top of encrypted LVM in GUI mode

Hi all,

I just installed Trisquel and I'm enjoying it!

But to get where I wanted to be I had to get over some hurdles and I thought I would share my experiences.

I saw many people asking for a way to install on top of an encrypted LVM with the GUI installer
(/boot will still go to it's own unencrypted partition).

I had to figure this out because the net installer didn't recognize the USB connected NIC on my laptop and so
that route was blocked for me and the options in the GUI installer didn't give me enough choice although the
NIC was usable there.

Anyway, here's what I did:

1) booted from the Trisquel live USB (the "try without installing" option)

2) attached an external USB hard drive (beware the data will be lost on the drive, so use an empty disk!) and
created the LVM setup for the install on that first (open a terminal and do: pvcreate /dev/sdX; vgcreate vg_system /dev/sdX; lvcrete....,
etc.) - this step is needed to have the LVM partitions available in the installer in the next step

3) started the Trisquel installation and created the /boot and encrypted partitions with the GUI installer (remember
to mark the encrypted partition to NOT be used - take away the "format to ext4" setting

4) go back to the terminal and remove the logical volume setup from the external hard drive and recreate it on the encrypted partition
(pvcreate /dev/mapper/sda2_crypt, etc.)

5) map the LVM targets in the GUI installer and finish the installation

Hope someone finds this helpful...