Question: About Veracrypt, gnome-disk and /etc configuration

Bluefin
1

Hi! I’m new to the world of immutable Linux distributions and Bluefin’s ease of use advertising convinced me over using Silverblue directly. So far I’m very happy with Bluefin. :smiley:

I read the documentation and assessed that I would not be able to use a particular application like Veracrypt. First of all I wanted to avoid layering by using rpm-ostree and as seen in this ticket, it is currently a problem to distribute Veracrypt as Flatpak.

However, for many years now gnome-disk has allowed you to open Veracrypt volumes natively, which is very useful and would help me compensate for the lack of Veracrypt directly. The problem is that you have to create a configuration file in /etc. So far I still don’t know how to handle this so that the configuration file stays in place on each system update.

I honestly don’t understand the technical reasons for that configuration file not being there out-of-the-box.

Can someone help me create the tcrypt.conf file in /etc/udisks2/?
I also have the concern that this configuration file is included by default in the core image of the operating system.

Greetings.

2

Custom config files in /etc/ should be left alone during updates so you should just be able to add the file like normal without issue.

I’m pretty sure all config files for packages are left alone during updates too. Only files I’ve come changing on me were the custom configs and scripts integrated/added by ublue directly for things.

3

Custom config files in /etc/ should be left alone during updates so you should just be able to add the file like normal without issue.

But Bluefin is not a normal distro, it is immutable and /etc is read-only. Do you really know how to add custom configurations to /etc and have them persist across upgrades?

4

I’ve modified several files in /etc/ and they have stayed after many updates.

5

Yes its immutable but that doesn’t mean the entire system is read-only. Parts of the system have to be writable for configing the system and data. /var and /etc are just two of the writable locations.

Silverblue gives a decent rundown of this which is what bluefin is based on