Re: what dose this do

On Sat, 2008-09-27 at 10:03 -0400, William Biggs wrote: Short answer: It'll make it very hard for people with physical access to boot your computer and read personal files (possibly containing passwords or other sensitive information). You pick a pass phrase which is used to encrypt most of the data on your hard disk. By default, all Linux partitions except /boot are encrypted. When you turn your computer on, you will be asked to enter your pass phrase. Using the correct pass phrase, Linux can decrypt and read the data. If your computer is powered off and someone else tries to access your files, he/she will not succeed as he/she does not know the pass phrase. Here is a quick example showing why this is useful. Suppose you have a laptop and it is stolen. At least, you now know that it will be very hard for the thief to access your files. The thief will not be able to read/use any information without the pass phrase. I hope this clarifies things a bit, Jeroen