So I got this very sexy Lenovo ThinkPad X61s with Vista-foobar edition preinstalled. I have to admit, I started it once to check if the additional memory extension and the whole thing works, but I don't ever want to use it. So, what else to use? Ubuntu? Allready have that at home and it's not too great. But I like Gentoo and a friend of mine also uses a ThinkPad Tablet X61 with Gentoo. So it can't be too complicated. He created a neat dmcrypt+LVM setup which I also wanted to use.

This page tries to document to installation process for this installation. 

First thing is to get a bootable USB Stick with a 64bit Linux. Ubuntu has a neat livecd and a tutorial to make it boot from USB Stick.

Next: install additional modules, because the livecd doesn't have it:

apt-get install lvm2 cryptsetup

Next:create partitions:

cfdisk /dev/sda

sda1 200MB /boot

sda2 100GB gentoocrypt

20GB unused for later use 

Next: dmcrypt setup

modprobe aes

modprobe dm-crypt

modprobe dm-mod

cryptsetup -y luksFormat /dev/sda2 dmc

Next: lvm setup

pvcreate /dev/mapper/dmc

vgcreate  cryptvg /dev/mapper/dmc

Next: lvm setup - partition layout  

lvcreate -L10G  -ngentooroot cryptvg

lvcreate -L4G   -ngentooswap cryptvg 

lvcreate -L10G -ngentoousr cryptvg

lvcreate -L4G   -ngentootmp cryptvg

lvcreate -L40G -ngentoohome cryptvg

Next: creating filesystems:

mkfs.ext2 -L boot /dev/sda1

mkfs.xfs -L root /dev/cryptvg/gentooroot

...

mkswap /dev/cryptvg/gentooswap 

Next: mount gentoo filesystems

cd /mnt/

mkdir gentoo

mount /dev/cryptvg/gentooroot gentoo

cd gentoo

mkdir boot home usr tmp

mount /dev/sda1 boot

mount /dev/cryptvg/gentoohome home

... 

from here on follow Gentoo Installation Manual for amd64 (even though it's a Core2 Duo) 

(current stage3 image is 2007.0 which is pretty old and doesn't have gcc4.x, so after installing the base system an emerge update world cannot hurt)

CFLAGS="-march=nocona -Os -pipe" 

Next: generate custom initrd image

[rbu scripts and tutorial here]

Busybox doesn't include the loadkey tool but has a custom loadkmap tool which uses a special binary keymap format. This binary keymap format can only be generated inside a busybox. To get the keymap files one can use another generated initrd image. The Gentoo genkernel script provide a decent collection (/lib/keymaps/*) which one can copy over to the custom image and load with loadkmap < /lib/keymaps/de.map