Does the installer now use LUKs encrypted partitions?

[graeme]

I want to use an existing LUKs excrypted partition as /home

Can the installer (in the Aug 2011 ISO) recognise LUKS encrypted partitions? I came across some references to problems with the old ISO.

If not, are there any known issues with installing on my (unencrypted) / parition and manually adding the crypttab and fstab entries to mount the encrypted partition (which is what I have done with various distros in the past)?

[TomRoche]

I want to use an existing LUKs excrypted partition as /home

Me, too: my next project (when I get some more time) is to convert my existing "hard" partitions to LVM and LUKS, as described, e.g., here. +1 on LMDE support.

[graeme]

I see from an earlier post that you want hibernate to work, so you have bit of extra config (possibly not if you use full disk encryption like Trye Crypt instead)

[graeme]

The installer seemed to recognise my encrypted partition, but did not indicate it had recognised it as encrypted, so I played it safe and did it by editing fstab and crypttab.

[TomRoche]

did it by editing fstab and crypttab.

For the benefit of the newbies out there, could you be a bit more specific about what you did and when you did it?

[graeme]

I already had a luks encrypted partition, so all I did was add:

Code: Select all

home /dev/sda6 none luks,tries=3

to /etc/crypttab

and

Code: Select all

/dev/mapper/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2

to /etc/fstab

and commented out the existing line for /home in fstab

Obviously you can use UUIDs instead of /dev/sd[X] and you need to change the fs type if it is not ext3.

"home" in the first column of crypttab is an arbitrary name, but it must match the /dev/mapper/[name] in the first column of fstab

I do not have instructions on how to create the encrypted partition, but there are lots of tutorials on the net.

You probably want to encrypt your swap partition as well, if you use one.

If I was starting to encrypt now, I would definitely look at ecryptfs which encrypts at the file level. I think Mint supports it out of the box by offering encrypted user directories.