New to Linux need some advise please

[BirdDad]

I will be using it primarily for making LUKS encrypted containers.
Can someone recommend a distro that can do this with a GUI? Console commands are not something I want to get into any time soon.
Is there a live CD that can do this? And can it mount TrueCrypt hard drives?
As I understand it I would need one that works with ex4 drives which windows cannot do. I need to either make format the drives in Linux to ex4 or use Gparted(which I am very comfortable using) to format a drive to ex4. From there where do I go?

 

[ch33zw1z]

here's LUKS man pages: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/en/man8/cryptsetup.8.html

wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptsetup

-look in here for Windows type information

Console commands are scary at first, but something you'll get used to while working with *nix systems.

1. Not sure about a gui, but here's a link just from a quick google search http://www.cyberciti.biz/hardware/howto-linux-hard-disk-encryption-with-luks-cryptsetup-command/

after you setup partitions, you can start the process of encrypting them using LUKS with: cryptsetup -y -v luksFormat /dev/xvdc

where xvdc will be replaced by whatever partition you want to encrypt.

Read through this, and look up other guides for more examples. You'll see towards the end this command: mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/backup2

If you wanted to use NTFS, it would be mkfs.ntfs /dev/mapper/whatever you named the mapping, guide uses backup2

2. Live CD: Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE, Arch Linux...plus others. Using cryptsetup/dm-crypt to setup LUKS encryption is part of the kernel after 2.6+

3. Truecrypt: Yes, truecrypt is available for Linux. I use Ubuntu on my "main" box, and the package is called "tcplay", installed like: sudo apt-get install tcplay

4.If you want to access the partitions in Windows, look in the wiki under "compatibility". There's software to access the dm-crypt paritions, and ext4 file systems as well. If you use NTFS, that's one less piece of software you have to use in Windows.

 

[BirdDad]

Thanks I will give this stuff some looking over.