I have purchased a new laptop today on which I want to install and use only RebornOS as my day to day system since it has everything I need and I love it so much.
The laptop will have 1 x Intel Celeron J4125 (Quad Core CPU / 4 threads @ 2.00 GHz / 2.70 GHz Turbo), 8 GB DDR4 RAM, 256 GB PCIe SSD, integrated graphics.
I would be very grateful though if anyone could help me answer some of the questions I have regarding the system install and maintenance.
What I would like to do is have at least 2 partitions on the SSD, one/several where the system itself is located and the last one for my system image backup and personal data, the latter of which I want to encrypt with LUKS. So, after the system install/configure/update is finished, what built-in tool can i use for partition imaging and which partitions should I image? I know Linux uses several partitions to store EFI/bootloader/system so I want to make sure I select everything related to the system to be backed up.
Also, if there is no built-in tool, is there anything I can install from your repos that would allow me to backup/image RebornOS? Or, would just keeping a separate USB stick with live RebornOS be enough to use a built-in partition tool from there to backup/restore the OS from the live environment?
Additionally, if i want to remotely access my computer over the internet without needing to port forward, is there a software I can use for this system?
And lastly, is RebornOS compatible with printers? I have a Xerox B215 Multifunctional Printer so i would like to know from your experience how good printer support is on RebornOS and if i have a chance of making it work.
Since data is written to the system partition all the time it is not possible to perform a perfectly coherent backup of the system partition during runtime, unless the backup software can make use of some filesystem-level snapshot feature that allows past states of the filesystem to be preserved. NTFS under newer Windows versions supports that, that’s why system backups are possible there. Ext4, the “standard” filesystem under Linux does not have such a feature. However, Btrfs, the successor to ext4, has.
Since the system and backup partitions would be on the same drive anyway I don’t see any advantage of backing up an existing Btrfs system snapshot to another partition on that same drive though, it would just waste a lot of space.
That’s why I would recommend setting your system up for Btrfs system snapshots by following this guide I wrote. That would not only allow you to create system snapshots at any time, but also to boot into these system snapshots and easily revert to older system states without having to boot into a live ISO.
Also, I think it would make sense to set up the second LUKS-encrypted partition as your /home partition. I sadly don’t have much experience with LUKS though.
Some general information:
You only need two partitions for a working UEFI Linux installation:
Your system partition. Path /
An EFI System Partition (ESP). Formatted in FAT12/16/32 and normally mounted to /boot/efi. Contains at least your bootloader or part of the bootloader. Normally shared with other operating systems in a Multi-Boot setup.
A swap partition is recommended. Alternatively a swap file can be used, but that doesn’t offer any real advantages (in my opinion).
In case the bootloader is not capable of reading the filesystem of the system partition a /boot partition is necessary, offloading the Linux kernels on a separate partition readable by the bootloader.
Other paths can be offloaded to other partitions too, for various reasons. Using a separate /home partition is popular.
Those partitions are mounted during system startup according to entries in /etc/fstab.