| Basic Tips for Using TrueCrypt in Puppy Crypt 4.3 |
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Friday, February 25th, 2011 19:44:44 GMT |
| GNU/Linux Tips |
Here are some brief notes on how to use TrueCrypt in the Puppy Crypt 4.3 variant of Puppy Linux. I'm guessing the info in this post probably works (or mostly works) with other types of Linux as well.
First of all, here's a great YouTube video I found that helped me - Install and use TrueCrypt Disk Encryption freeware on Ubuntu & other Linux Distros
That video is by Johnson Yip.
I was initially baffled about how to even locate my encrypted file containers in the Select File window (since you can't just go to the C or D drive).
But, thanks in part to the above video, I wasn't baffled for long.
To mount an encrypted file container in TrueCrypt:
(In case you don't know how to find your encrypted file container - in Puppy Linux, there are icons on the desktop which will allow you to open up your computer's drives (or partitions of drives). Those icons have names like sda2 or sda3 (in my case, those are the C and D partitions of my hard drive) or sdb1 (my USB flash thumb drive), or sr1 (my DVD-RW drive)).
or
Click the Select File button, click File System in the Places list, and click the mnt directory. If the drive (or partition) where you have your TrueCrypt encrypted file container is mounted, it will be listed in that directory, and you can just click on that drive (or partition) and navigate to your encrypted file container.
However, if the drive (or partition) where you have your TrueCrypt encrypted file container isn't listed in the mnt directory already, you'll have to mount it. In Puppy Linux, you can mount drives and partitions just by clicking the desktop icons with names like sda2, sda3, sb1, or sr1. When those drives (or partitions) are mounted, they'll instantly appear in the mnt directory list, and then you'll be able to navigate to your encrypted file container.
(There's also a Linux command to mount things from a command line - the mount command. However, that looks awfully complicated and I don't fully understand that yet. It's much easier to just click the icons to mount your drives and partitions.)
My TrueCrypt encrypted file containers were all created with TrueCrypt for Windows, and happily, they seem to work perfectly with TrueCrypt for Linux as well.
TrueCrypt in Linux looks almost just like TrueCrypt in Windows. The most noticeable difference (at least to me) at a glance is that instead a list of drive letters being shown in the main window, numbers in a column called "Slot" are shown instead.