Debian Installation :: Custom Encrypted LVM Install

After my NVIDIA card died I decided it was time to buy an AMD card again (R9 270X), but I didn't think AMD drivers were such a pain in Linux as people said. Of course, in some distros anyway. On Arch, for example, there's no official release because Arch's developers would have to hold Xorg in order to make a closed-source driver available, because AMD's pace isn't in pair with Linux. So in order to install AMD's drivers on Arch I must rely on some guy's unnoficial repositories, but that isn't the whole problem. Even though I'm cool with adding repos and downgrading Xorg, I'm not cool with it not working for a lot of apps, so that's where I decided to try a few distros. Manjaro is a no-go because it installs Flash as default. openSUSE although is a very good distro, is a complete mess when it comes to repositories, specially multimedia ones. Ubuntu/Mint are also a no-go, Ubuntu because after 12.04 they have a spyware by default, and Mint because it contains non-free stuff by default.

So here I come! I ran Debian in the past for a long time (aside from a breaf period last year) and it was lovely, I could easily set up a custom encrypted install, but now I don't remember how to, and it's killing me. I don't like how the installer doesn't show the partitions size as they actually are, and I don't like how the automated encrypted LVM setup doesn't let me chose the encryption algorithm or the timeframe between each passphrase attempt. That's why I must create my install, and here's what I used to do on Arch (the part that really matters), converted to what I use on Debian:

Code: Select all# modprobe dm-mod

(create one 1GB partition for /boot, unencrypted ; create another big 930 GB formatted as "8e" - LVM - on dev/sda2)
Code: Select all# fdisk /dev/sda
(chose my ciphers and iter time)
Code: Select all# cryptsetup -c twofish-xts-plain64 -y-s 512 --iter-time 5000 luksFormat /dev/sda2
(open the luks container on "sda2_crypt")

[Code].....

After this is done, I go to the "partition disks" page where I select each partition/volume to it's correct destination. I then proceed to installing the base system, configuring apt, and all that. Now, before I install Grub I used to execute the following commands on shell:

Code: Select all # nano /etc/crypttab

I used to put something there, but I don't remember what exactly. It's been a long time since I used Debian for long! But here's what I put there:

Code: Select allsda2_crypt /dev/mapper/sda2_crypt none luks

Then I procceeded to instal syslinux (I REALLY don't like GRUB)

Code: Select all# chroot /target
# apt-get install syslinux

But I get the following error:

E: cannot write log (Is /dev/pts mounted?) - posix_openpt (2: No such file or directory).