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Installing Truecrypt on Raspbian

The Raspberry Pi can easily be used as Media Center. However, when using Truecrypt-encrypted hard drives, installation can be rather complicated. This article will give detailed instructions on how to install Truecrypt on Raspbian.

For installing Truecrypt on Raspbian I used the following article on carrier-lost.org : Raspberry Pi: Truecrypt on Raspbian. Nevertheless, I came across some minor problems. I succeeded in installing Truecrypt on Raspbian by following these steps:

To install Raspbian, I followed the detailed guide here. To get started with Raspbian I installed Firefox and Nautilus:

$ su
$ apt-get install iceweasel
$ apt-get install nautilus

In addition, make sure the build essentials are installed:

$ apt-get install build-essential

Note: Some of the following commands may require root access, so when not using su as above, use sudo instead. sudo may not be installed in advance. For adding a user to the sudoer list, use

$ adduser <user> sudo

Now we are ready to install Truecrypt:

  • Download the Truecrypt sources from here. As the current 7.2 is missing the Makefile, I (as in [1]) used version 7.1a. The source code is available here: https://github.com/FauxFaux/truecrypt. To unzip the downloaded .zip file use the unzip command:
    $ apt-get install unzip
    $ unzip truecrypt-targz.zip
    $ mv truecrypt-targz truecrypt-7.1a
    
    I renamed the folder containing the truecrypt source files to truecrypt-7.1a.
  • Download the wxWidgets files from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wxwindows/files/2.8.11/. I used version 2.8.11. Again, unzip the files:
    $ unzip wxWidgets-2.8.11.zip -d wxWidgets
    
  • As described in [1], we need to download some needed header files. Download all *.h files from here: ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-11/v2-20/ and place them in Truecrypt/pkcs/. This can also be done using the command line:
    $ mkdir truecrypt-7.1a/pkcs
    $ wget ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-11/v2-20/*.h -P truecrypt-7.1a/pkcs/
    
  • Now, we need to install the following libraries:
    $ apt-get install build-essentials
    $ apt-get install pkg-config
    $ apt-get install gtk2.0-dev
    $ apt-get install libfuse-dev
    
    For a detailed list of requirements, see the README.txt of the Truecrypt download:
    Requirements for Building TrueCrypt for Linux and Mac OS X:
    -----------------------------------------------------------
    
    - GNU Make
    - GNU C++ Compiler 4.0 or compatible
    - Apple Xcode (Mac OS X only)
    - NASM assembler 2.08 or compatible (x86/x64 architecture only)
    - pkg-config
    - wxWidgets 2.8 shared library and header files installed or
      wxWidgets 2.8 library source code (available at http://www.wxwidgets.org)
    - FUSE library and header files (available at http://fuse.sourceforge.net
      and http://code.google.com/p/macfuse)
    - RSA Security Inc. PKCS #11 Cryptographic Token Interface (Cryptoki) 2.20
      header files (available at ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-11/v2-20)
      located in a standard include path or in a directory defined by the
      environment variable 'PKCS11_INC'.
    
  • After installing all needed libraries, we are ready to compile wxWidgets. First configure and build wxWidgets (if ./configure does not work immediately, chmod +x configure may be appropriate). This may take some time ...
    $ cd wxWidgets
    $ ./configure
    $ make 
    $ make install
    
  • Now, we are ready to install Truecrypt:
    $ cd ../truecrypt-7.1a
    $ export PKCS11_INC=/home/david/truecrypt-7.1a/pkcs/
    $ make NOGUI=1 WX_ROOT=/home/david/wxWidgets-2.8.12 wxbuild
    $ make NOGUI=1 WXSTATIC=1
    
    This, as well, may take some time. Note that my username is david - so the paths /home/david/truecrypt-7.1a/pkcs/ and /home/david/wxWidgets-2.8.12/ need to be adapted accordingly.
  • Move the executable to the /usr/local/bin directory:
    $ cp Main/truecrypt /usr/local/bin/
    

To check whether truecrypt has been installed successfully:

$ truecrypt --version

which will be TrueCrypt 7.1a.

Truecrypt is installed and can be used as follows, for example for mounting an external hard drive which is encrypted using truecrypt:

$ mkdir /media/truecrypt/
$ fdisk -l
$ truecrypt /dev/sda1 /media/truecrypt/

Here, fdisk -l is used to see whether the external hard drive is available (to know that we want to mount /dev/sda1).

References

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