Installing TrueCrypt in Fedora 9
TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/) is a popular free on-the-fly disk encryption software that can encrypt files, partitions, whole disks and even a windows installation. It is an extremely useful and important tool if you wish to keep personal and confidential data from being accessed by unauthorized people. TrueCrypt even supports plausible deniability, allowing you to hide an encrypted volume inside another volume. TrueCrypt volumes are indistinguishable from random data, so an adversary cannot prove that you have a TrueCrypt volume hidden inside a dummy encrypted volume.
Unfortunately, the TrueCrypt website only provides binaries for Ubuntu and OpenSuSE, so for those of us running other distros, the only option is to compile from source. The steps below outline the installation procedure on a Fedora 9 machine.
For an advanced encryption utility, TrueCrypt is surprisingly light on size and dependencies. Download the TrueCrypt sources from http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads2.php (Select Mac OS X / Linux (.tar.gz) from the combo box and tick the check box to agree to the license agreement before clicking the Download button) and wxWidget sources from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=9863 (You only need the wxGTK bundle).
Step 1:
Install the fuse libraries.
sudo yum install fuse-devel
Step 2:
Untar the sources.
tar xvf TrueCrypt\ 5.1a\ Source.tar.gz
tar xvf wxGTK-2.8.7.tar.gz
Step 3:
Build the wxWidgets sources for TrueCrypt.
cd truecrypt-5.1a-source/
make WX_ROOT=../wxGTK-2.8.7 wxbuild
Edit:An anonymous commenter pointed out that passing a relative path to WX_ROOT resulted in compilation errors. If you have the same problem, provide the full path to wxGTK.
make WX_ROOT=/home/januz/Downloads/wxGTK-2.8.7 wxbuild
Step 4:
Build TrueCrypt.
gcc 4.3 is very strict during compilation, therefore you will encounter compilation errors with a message similar to “‘memcpy’ was not declared in this scope“. The fix is to simply add
#include <cstring> to each of the following files:
- Platform/Memory.cpp
- Volume/EncryptionTest.cpp
- Core/FatFormatter.cpp
I have created a patch file with the above changes which can be found here. To apply the patch, run the following command:
patch -p1 < truecrypt5.1.patch
Once the sources are patched, compile TrueCrypt by typing
make
Step 5:
Once make has finished running, the TrueCrypt executable can be found inside the Main directory. Simply copy it to your bin folder to add it to the executable path.
cp Main/truecrypt ~/bin
That’s it ! TrueCrypt is quite intuitive and easy to use. But if you’re in doubt, have a look through http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/ which has very detailed instructions on getting started.
Related Posts
