The Encrypted Laptop Howto
Protecting your privacy is becoming much harder these days (for example we can tell from your IP almost instantly, unless you are using a strange ISP or some form of anonymization, that you are somewhere in The United States) and compared to 10 or even 5 years ago we are having to run more and more software to protect ourselves (e.g. Virus checker, Spyware checker, Firewall).
Sadly the one thing all this software can't protect against is the physical theft of your computer; all a data thief needs then is to plug your hard disk into his own computer, and hey-presto he has access to all your personal information, including things you didn't think were on there like your credit card details, inadvertently stored in the Windows pagefile last time you shopped.
The solution is to encrypt your whole hard drive, and not just your documents I mean your whole hard drive. This is where it gets tricky; encryption software to do that usually cost's lots of money.
Of course people running a system with a single 32 bit version of Windows XP (or above) and no other OS can use the free package CompuSec to encrypt the whole of their disk. Sadly this package encrypts the whole of the physical drive, it doesn't differentiate between partitions, so if you are running a dual boot Linux/ Windows laptop you will be out of luck.
It is for the rest of us (using 64bit versions of Windows, or a dual boot system) that I have written this howto, which will secure your system using nothing but free software.
This was primarily written for people with a dual boot laptop, but since it can be used in different ways I have provided a number of ways of viewing this howto; hence this howto can't just be called 'The encrypted dual boot laptop howto', it can also be called the 'Encrypted root openSuSE 10.3 howto', or the 'Encrypted dual boot single hard drive system howto'.
The different howto's are listed in the local links section (the grey box to the left for users of the graphical site, the labelled section for users of the text only site).
There is also a PDF of the whole article available for download; this will allow you to print it off easily if the system you intend to work on is the only system you have to view web pages with. It's also much easier to read.
The PDF is available for free here.