Brian McKee wrote:
On 18-Mar-08, at 12:52 PM, Russell Gadd wrote:
Alternatively is anyone using version 5 happily without suffering
negative experience as mentioned in some places, e.g. Truecrypt 5.1 -
How I loathe thee <http://forums.truecrypt.org/viewtopic.php?t=10025>
One user suggests he will return in a year's time. I don't want to
wait that long for a usable version.
I tried to follow that link....
From their website
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Hi Brian,
In case you are interested I copied the text from this link below.
Russell
How I loathe thee - posted by trueg
=======================
Before I begin my review of Truecrypt 5.1, You should know that I am not
new to encryption. I have been using truecrypt 4.3 first on windows and
then on linux with good results. Everything I do on this machine is
automatically encrypted after login. While truecrypt without a gui was
difficult to use at first, as I learned the commands it actually became
easier and more efficient to use. Always, I found it to be fast,
responsive and seamless.
Today, I installed truecrypt 5.1 on an older machine, to test it out.
The experience has been so unforgivably horrible, that I have had to
revert to 4.3 just to accomplish the most basic of tasks. I found myself
writing a list of everything wrong with this version so as not to forget
something.
As a linux user, there is a lot to find attractive in version 5. For
example, Mounted volumes appear in the side pane of Nautilus. The
graphical user interface has been ported from windows. When selecting a
drive to encrypt, the GUI will list the size of each partition
preventing the horrible of mistake of typing /dev/sdb instead of
/dev/sdc. However, if you don't want to use the GUI you will have to
type truecrypt -t before every command. This quickly gets tiresome. If I
wanted to launch the GUI, I wouldn't have typed $truecrypt in the
command line, would I. This became so tiresome that I was forced to
create a wrapper to prevent the damned little GUI windows from launching
every time I did anything in the command line.
If you are confused about any of the new features in truecrypt, don't
expect to go to the man pages. What once existed in truecrypt 4.3 seems
to have been erased. The 'Help' function doesn't work either. Other
annoyances to add to the list: 1. The icon for truecrypt that appears in
the sytem tray, disappears the moment you close the program. 2. Double
clicking on a drive is supposed to open a file explorer window of the
drive. It doesn't even fail, it just sits there doing nothing. 3.
$truecrypt -d # doesn't appear to work anymore. 4. Even in text mode,
you will have to dismiss more questions to accomplish basic tasks. 5. I
couldn't mount unformatted volumes from the command line. (more on this
in a bit)
These annoyances are not the worst of it. The structure of truecrypt has
been so fundamentally altered that I couldn't even do a relatively
simple task: create an XFS encrypted volume on an external drive.
After creating the encrypted volume, I attempted to load it so I could
make the XFS filesystem. ( Why truecrypt can't give me this option when
I first created the volume is a mystery to me. only the FAT filesystem
is available) After typing in my long password, truecrypt refused to let
me load it because the partition had no filesystem. Of course it
doesn't! I haven't formatted it yet! Instead of letting me mount it
anyway I had to type in the entire password again, but this time click
the button more options and select "do not mount." Grr.
I opened Gparted, my favorite disk formatting utility, but it seems
truecrypt has changed the way it works. Instead of mount volumes on
/dev/truecrypt? It now mounts them on /dev/loop? This means that
truecrypt volumes don't show up in Gparted anymore. It also destroys all
old scripts that I had built to work with truecrypt. "Okay", I thought,
I'll just have to use the command line $mkfs -t xfs /dev/loop? This work
for the first few innodes, but then stalled on 28/1100. "Stalled" is to
weak a word, it completely FROZE the entire computer forcing me to do a
hard reboot.
Regardless, I pressed on. I created the XFS filesystem using a different
computer that still had the GOOD truecrypt installed. Then, I mounted
the volume with BAD truecrypt and attempted to copy some files. It was
60 MiB in when it completely FROZE the computer once again. I watched as
the time remaining counter started count up. The message box was saying
400 HOURS estimated before I had enough and did a hard reboot again.
It's as if the entire driver has been rewritten and the result is EPIC
FAIL. This reminds me of the problems experienced by Windows Vista users.
By this point, I had had enough. I reinstalled truecrypt 4.3 and did
everything I mentioned earlier. The volume formatted flawlessly and the
file copy only took a few minutes. Suffice it to say, I will not be
going back anytime soon. The minor annoyances, I could have worked
around for the easy use of the GUI. But to fail so completely at the
most basic task. That is simply unforgivable.
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