Hi Julien, Julien Claassen schrieb: as a general linux advice, use cryptsetup-luks. It works at the kernel level, thus being way faster than any software-based solution. Depending on your system, you need the packages "cryptsetup" and "dmsetup." Cryptsetup integrates easily with all modern desktop environments - with the necessary packages installed, it's as simple as "plug in, type in passphrase, use." ;) A good (German) introduction to cryptsetup can be found here: http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/LUKS Be aware, though, that crytsetup is designed to encrypt entire partitions. If you want to encrypt a single directory on an unencrypted partition, it's a good idea to use Truecrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/) which provides pre-compiled packages for a number of distributions. Truecrypt allows you to create a crypto-container into which you can save your directory. (The same is possible with cryptsetup using a loop-device, but I haven't found a GUI for this yet, so you'd have to open and close it on the commandline every time.) Always remember that every encryption need processing power. So, of course, working with audio software on encrypted partitions challenges your hardware more than working without encryption. It's a good idea to test the impact on your machine before starting with production work. Hope that helps, Lutz

Hi Julien, Since you're a seasoned command line hacker you don't need any packages or special tools at all. The text below is from <http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/opensource/?p=67> To begin, you’ll need to load the aes and cryptoloop modules in the kernel if they are not already available. This can be done by executing: # modprobe cryptoloop # modprobe aes Most modern Linux distributions provide these modules from the get-go, so you shouldn’t have to recompile the kernel. Once this is done, create the filesystem container, associate it to a loopback device interface, and format it: # dd if=/dev/urandom of=enc.img bs=1M count=50 # losetup -e aes /dev/loop0 enc.img Password: # mkfs -t ext2 /dev/loop0 # mount /dev/loop0 # mount -o loop,encryption=aes enc.img /media/disk The first step creates an empty image file called enc.img with a size of 50 MB; you can increase this by changing the count value. Next, use losetup to associate the enc.img file to the /dev/loop0 device and tell it that the device is to be encrypted with AES encryption. This command uses 128-bit AES encryption; look at the losetup manpage to see what other encryption types you can use. You will have to provide a password that will be used from that point forward to access the image. Next, the filesystem is formatted with the ext2 filesystem. Finally, it is mounted to /media/disk. The options passed to mount tell it to use the loopback interface and the encryption type needed. When you call mount, you will have to provide the password you used to encrypt the image. Putting this kind of image in /etc/fstab will not work unless you want to be prompted for your password on each boot. Instead, this should be accessed as needed. For instance, you could store the file as ~/.enc.img so it’s hidden from normal view, with mode 0600 permissions. Wrapper scripts could be written to mount and umount the image easily: #!/bin/sh mount ~/.enc.img mkdir -p /media/secure && mount -o loop,encryption=aes ~/.enc.img /media/secure And to unmount the volume when you’re finished with it: #!/bin/sh umount /media/secure && rmdir /media/secure These two commands could be saved as ~/bin/ms and ~/bin/ums respectively. Alternatively, you could add the following to ~/.bashrc and uses aliases instead: alias ms="mkdir -p /media/secure && mount -o loop,encryption=aes ~/.enc.img /media/secure" alias ums="umount /media/secure && rmdir /media/secure" Ciao, -- FA Io lo dico sempre: l'Italia è troppo stretta e lunga.