Encryption

[Member arnauld]

Hi,

First I would like to say Hello!

I plan to install Antix on an old (10 years I think) HP laptop currently running Manjaro:

OS: Manjaro 22.0.0 Sikaris
██████████████████ ████████ Kernel: x86_64 Linux 5.4.228-1-MANJARO
██████████████████ ████████
████████ ████████ Packages: 2834
████████ ████████ ████████ Shell: zsh 5.9
████████ ████████ ████████ Resolution: 1600×900
████████ ████████ ████████ DE: Xfce4
████████ ████████ ████████ WM: Xfwm4
████████ ████████ ████████ WM Theme: Matcha-sea
████████ ████████ ████████ GTK Theme: Greybird [GTK2]
████████ ████████ ████████ Icon Theme: gnome
████████ ████████ ████████ Font: Fira Code 8
████████ ████████ ████████ Disk: 256G / 582G (47%)
CPU: Intel Core i3 M 330 @ 4x 2.133GHz
GPU: GeForce G 105M
RAM: 2633MiB / 3860MiB

My main question is, is it possible to do full disk encryption? Using Antix Installer? Does it worth to install Antix in place of Manjaro? To gain speed, etc.. on my old laptop?

Although I have been using Linux for a few years, I consider myself as an intermediate Linux user and never tried to encrypt my disks before…

Thank you for any suggestions.

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Arnauld

[Member Robin]

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Welcome arnauld

Some thoughts about your questions.
To start with: I’m not familiar with full encryption of the OS. I never used it by now. Having said this, let me say:

1.) Encryption is generally something which easily can outpower your hardware resources. It needs much CPU resources to do all the encryption and decryption tasks needed then. This will probably slow down old hardware remarkably.

2.) What you’ll get with antiX on old hardware is a very fast and powerful OS you wouldn’t believe it is possible to have a comfortable and responsive GUI on even 18-20 years old devices. Real life example: My 32bit single core Pentium M CPU notebook runs as fast for everyday tasks like Internet surfing, Text processing, Video playback, complex graphics editing etc. with antiX as many most recent notebooks can’t do any better with recent Windows versions (which wouldn’t even be installable on my hardware).
So I would say: antiX is a good choice when it’s about old hardware (while it speeds up things on most recent hardware also, you just won’t notice this probably on everyday tasks due to the massive overkill the hardware provides nowadays).

arnauld wrote:

never tried to encrypt my disks before

Same here. So just wait for somebody who has experience with this specific task on antiX.

Many greetings
Robin

Windows is like a submarine. Open a window and serious problems will start.

[Member arnauld]

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Thank you. I will wait then for encryption. However I will install Antix to have a try. 🙂

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Arnauld

[Forum Admin anticapitalista]

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You can install antiX with encryption if you want.

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[Member arnauld]

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Thank you. I installed Antix with encryption yesterday evening and everything was fine, very easy installation process. I am now a new happy Antix user.

I have now to play around with Antix settings as I feel a bit lost coming from Manjaro but as I am also a Raspberry Pi user I think it will be ok.

Have a good day.

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Arnauld

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