So I’ve spent the last few evenings building a local Ubuntu repository mirror for localized network installations. While installing a machine today I noticed a new option within the partitioner. Encryption! The installer now lets you select partitions to be installed as encrypted, and also a guided partitioner that will create encrypted LVM partitions.
I’ve played with the features a bit since I found it and this is something I’ll definitely be using! Encrypted root, swap, etc. The only thing that is unencrypted is the /boot partition, which is required for the boot process pre-unencrypting.
So far, in my continued testing, Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy” is shaping up very nicely. For any of you that have been putting off updating you have nothing to be afraid of. It’s been working great for me so far and the more people we can get finding and reporting bugs for the next week the better it’ll get before final.
Any idea whether when I upgrade from Fiesty to Gutsy I can also move from a 32-bit to 64-bit installation? When I had originally installed Dapper, I went with the 32-bit version because the 64-bit version was being flaky and I figured it wasn’t as well supported? I’d probably have to do a clean install, no?
Getsy will automatically support my ATI X1400 and Realtek HD Audio or not?
I started upgrading to Gutsy two nights ago and finished it last night – took forever to download the new files. Apart from a minor problem with the graphics card (which I get every single time a new version comes out) which the new version simply dropped be back to 640 x 480 resolution my only complaint was a weird error that spammed the TTYs. If you get errors:
device_mapper …. dm_linear: Device lookup failed
Spamming about 10 times a second simply:
killall udevd
to stop it and uninstall evms. A few people are having this apparently (googling for the error brings up the bug report on it in the first or second result).
Apart from that it’s all looking good so far 🙂
Sokun, no, the radeonhd driver is not yet being shipped with Ubuntu. You have to install it manually…
Encryption feature happily merged from Debian (I think that I saw it in Etch). Wow, Gutsy ships with lot of innovation.
Wow! This is great. Thanks for the heads up!
Do you notice much of a speed hit when using encrypted filesystems?
@Steve
Yes, the 64-bit version is now a lot better supported. Now 32-bit plugin wrappers for firefox are standard installed so you can have flash etc. Also the medibuntu repository has now w64codecs which enable you to playback .wmv files on a 64-bit system.
You will have to do a clean install to migrate architecture.
Awesome blog. Got your link from someone in #kubuntu; required reading for Ubuntu/Kubuntu nuts, of which I count myself among.
Wow!
Great news!
Is it a feature of the Alternate installer?
(I guess that.)
Or Desktop?
Thanks for sharing the news.
regards
@Christopher – I only use the alternate CD so I haven’t checked the Desktop, but I’m interested as well.
“Do you notice much of a speed hit when using encrypted filesystems?”
Yes, but only when copying large amounts of files. I can play ut2004 at full speed with full disk encryption.
Let’s bring this in the visual installer
yeah!
I agree with you about testing prior to the release – but my linux time is quite limited and I dont want to go through a reinstall when it gest officially released.
Good article but for people like me a link explaining (or a brief introduction) explaining mroe about encrypted filesystems would be appreciated. 🙂
Konrad – I had a previous article explaining how to manually do this and it may be of more information to you:
http://tinyurl.com/2qc6eq
As far as a speed hit goes with the encrypted hard drive, no, I have been using one for many many years, 2002 I believe I setup my first encrypted root before I saw any documentation on it (boy was that fun 😀 ) amyways, I have also read, your average system can do the encryption in memory faster then the disk can read or write which means you will never be waiting for the encryption process before disk read/write is done. There are some slowdowns because additional work is being done but I think your average person would need a machine driven test in order to see it, I mean a person can’t really tell the difference IMHO… now just to sit back and wait for solid state hard drives to become the standard, that will be speed => “Hey steve, your computer must be screwed up, it took forever to boot today, I mean I must have been waiting 3 seconds” 😉
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