Hi linux-crypto, hi pplf, hi Sam, Thank you for such a nice welcome in the group. pplf has been very helpful with clear and exact help on Mandrake encryption. I appreciate your help very much. Nice to meet you, Sam. I have turned off SWAP on my XP laptop and noticed no ill effects until now. With 256, 512, or 1024MB memory in todays computers, I wonder if a SWAP is not an out-dated concept from the days when 32MB memory was mind-boggling and terribly expensive. I don't need 5 large pgms running simultaneously, each with mega-large images, spreedsheets, etc. Also today's HDDs are usually ATA-100, CPUs Pent-4 at more than 1 GHz clock, bus 32-bits wide, so pgms load so fast that it is no big deal to exit and reload a pgm. And I imagine that Linux, even with XWINDOW, is still faster than WIN XP. This leaves the problems of TMP files, slack space, and behind-your-back ADSL IP connections to MS and/or ??. The first two Eraser should take care of. The last can be eliminated by making the transition to Linux. However, every transition is difficult. Since I don't think I can drop WIN from one day to the next, a transition will be necessay. Any comments on VMWARE, especially parallel port connections to Logitech scanner? I have two laptops and could decide to make them both multi-boot, with or without VMWARE, or dedicate one laptop fully to Linux. Mandrake 9.0 might even be able to network to the WIN machine and natively read NTFS, even without SAMBA?? Comments? If I decide to make both laptops multi-boot, I am thinking of 1 WIN partition, 1 Mandrake encrypted partition, 1 Linux SWAP partition. I think it would be better for me to have things like /home, /var, /tmp, etc. as subdirectories and not partitions. Then if I am traveling and can only take one laptop, I have both Linux and WIN, until the day arrives when I can totally drop WIN. One important question is "plausible deniability". pplf, does Mandrake 9.0 allow putting certain data on still another partition with a different password without this being apparent? In other words, if put under pressure, can one divulge one passphrase to open up a part of the OS without showing that there is still another encrypted partition? Or does FIPS partition pgm show all? Do all encrypted partitions have known headers? Suggestions, comments? Before you can run, you have to learn how to walk, so I thank the group for tolerating my newbie questions. Best regards, Earl - Linux-crypto: cryptography in and on the Linux system Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/
