Friendly Home Encrypted Partition:

I've been wanting to hear everyone's opinion on this.

I'd love to setup a home partition with encryption that would be accessible
by most linux distros specifically Ubuntu/Linux Mint/Suse.

This would make things easy if I wish to install a couple distros and want to have them access my home partition.

Let me know the options and I'll give you a gold star and/or cookie!!

 

Decrypted on the fly?
Mrk

 

Yes, exactly.

 

cryptsetup is the way to do it, best option in terms of cross distro compatibility.
First problem, how do we get it mounted to /home before the user logs in?
A dirty workaround would be: log into console as root, mount, exit, log into graphical user account.
There's crypttab and fstab and the like to automatically mount it at boot time. An again dirty workaround would be running a script but that would mean plaintext passphrase! A keyfile on a usb stick could be an option.

I can help you with setting up the partition itself with cryptsetup but not with the rest.