Hello and thanks + encrypted usb disk problem

[Member denispr]

Hi everyone,
I’m new and this is my first post to the forum.
A big thanks to all the Antix folks for the nice work done on Antix. It runs smooth and fast, and is very easy to use, I really appreciate the philosophy of keeping alive old computers.
The only problem I’m facing is with LUKS encrypted USB disk. On my previous distro (LMDE), I was used to be prompted for passphrase when inserting the encrypted disk. With Antix, nothing happens. Is there anyway to enable that functionality ?
Thanks,
Denis

[Member seaken64]

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Hi Denis, welcome to antiX. I’m afraid I have no experience with LUKS. But I’m sure there are others here who can help. I’m sure antiX can be made to do what you need.

Seaken64

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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Welcome to the antiX distribution and the antiX forum Denis. Like Seaken64, I have no personal experience with LUKS.

I did look up a few things. In case you have not yet seen them, perhaps a few links will be helpful; that’s all I can offer unless an “expert” is handy.

https://blog.fidelramos.net/software/unlock-luks-usb-drive

Will this one solve the problem?

https://www.howtoforge.com/automatically-unlock-luks-encrypted-drives-with-a-keyfile

More information:
https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2020/08/breaking-luks-encryption/

I wonder if this next tip will be more helpful?
https://gist.github.com/da-n/4c77d09720f3e5989dd0f6de5fe3cbfb

Since I’m not an expert and I have not used any of these methods I am not sure what exactly is needed and what is missing that the Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) provided. Hopefully these articles will give you some things to examine, and perhaps even figure out how to add a mechanism that you can use with antiX.

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Brian Masinick

[Member denispr]

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Hi Seaken64 and Brian,

Thank you both for your replies, and to you Brian for your research and the links.
Unfortunately, they all seem to provide solutions for password-less decrypting and mounting, at boot time or on the fly, while I’m looking for another behavior : being prompted for passphrase in a graphical window when inserting USB encrypted drive while my icewm session is open.
I tried MX Linux to compare, since both distros are close : with MX, no problem, a graphical window to enter passphrase is displayed when inserting the USB drive.
I guess there are some core components that are installed in MX and not Antix, that provide that behaviour, But I cannot guess which ones.

Regards,

Denis

[Member Xecure]

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MX uses a Desktop Environment. MX has many things automatic. antiX is very minimalistic, and some things need to be done using the terminal.

I don’t have any encrypted devices, so I cannot test.

Change you preferred File Manager to SpaceFM and see if you can mount your LUKS device clicking on it in the SpaceFM Devices side panel.

If that doesn’t work, based on this post, you can mount it using the terminal:

Anonymous wrote:

Open LUKS container partitions

sudo cryptsetup open /dev/LUKSpartition NAME --type luks
Example: sudo cryptsetup open /dev/sda1 EncUSB --type luks

Upon entering your passphrase/password, a symlink appears at /dev/mapper/NAME

Then I mounted it by first creating a directory:
sudo mkdir /mnt/directoryname
Example: sudo mkdir /mnt/USB1
Then mounting:
sudo mount /dev/mapper/NAME /mnt/directoryname
Example: sudo mount /dev/mapper/EncUSB /mnt/USB1

The encrypted partition will then be accessible.

Then for closing the container:

sudo umount /mnt/directoryname
Example: sudo umount /mnt/USB1
Then,
sudo cryptsetup close NAME
Example: sudo cryptsetup close EncUSB

But it doesn’t automount, so no joy there.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 4 months ago by Xecure. Reason: Fixed double quote

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Member denispr]

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Thank you Xecure pour your reply,

in fact, the encrypted USB disk does not even appear in SpaceFM devices side panel.

And since I often plug and unplug that disk and 2 other encrypted disks, I’m looking for some easier way than having to manage it from a terminal.
Anyway, thanks for the terminal command lines that I will be able to use as a temporary workaround.

I will go on investigating and let you know if I find a solution (it does not seem to be directly related to the Desktop Environment since it works with LMDE on an Icewm session)

Regards

[Member seaken64]

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I have noticed that in Debian that the IceWM session is an overlay on the DE. It may be similar with LMDE. This is only to suggest that those implementations may have more stuff loaded as services than antiX does by default. MX also has more services loaded. We just have to find the services and scripts that are being used to handle the encrypted drives in those systems and see if they can be added to antiX. I have no idea if that will be possible without adding a full DE. Maybe someone else will know.

Seaken64

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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What desktop environment is IceWM overlaid on in Debian?

I have been able to run just a WM on Debian without other software running that I am aware of,

Mind you, I created the additional wm and software myself, not using some canned set-up. Am I missing something here?

Next time I run Debian Sid I will have a good look at what is running on the system.

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Brian Masinick

[Forum Admin anticapitalista]

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LMDE defaults to using Cinnamon so installing IceWM on top will mean you still have all the Cinnamon-goodies that no doubt enable opening encrypted usb sticks.

If you can let us know how LMDE does it, we might be able to add opening encrypted data disks to antiX in the future.

Added: You probably need to install various gvfs libs to get it to work

• This reply was modified 2 years, 4 months ago by anticapitalista. Reason: added extra info

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

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[Member seaken64]

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Brian, on my last two Debian installs I had XFCE. Even though I selected “IceWM”. But it may be that I just didn’t do something right. Maybe if I started with NET I could have IceWM only. I will have to try it again. Anyway, I do have IceWM running on both Debian 9 and Debian 10. The menus are not setup as nicely as antiX and I struggle to work with Debian due to a lot of permissions issues. I’m still learning. But this is one thing I appreciate about antiX. It smooths out a lot of the difficulty in learning Debian.

I would be happy the learn how to setup Debian with IceWM without first having XFCE installed. Any tips you can give on what steps I need to take? I get a little overwhelmed at their site. There is so much and it is confusing to know which iso to download.

Seaken64

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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I have the Xfce desktop environment installed too. Maybe this is about which services are started by default. I know what when I use the smxi tool on some systems it is easy to start or stop services. Without a tool, it is necessary to look at what processes are running. Also in the rc (run level directories) you can specify which services run on a systme; you can stop them if you know where to find the procedures. The rc.5 and other directories are in the /etc file hierarchy.

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Brian Masinick

[Member seaken64]

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From what anticapitalista said it seems that antiX may not support encrypted disks yet. Adding a DE probably won’t solve this, but more work under the hood will be needed. It seems that some other distros (like LMDE and MX) have already added this support with their default DE. Adding support for encrypted disks to the GUI is antiX seems, for now at least, to be a personal project for the user.

Seaken64

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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seaken64 wrote:

From what anticapitalista said it seems that antiX may not support encrypted disks yet. Adding a DE probably won’t solve this, but more work under the hood will be needed. It seems that some other distros (like LMDE and MX) have already added this support with their default DE. Adding support for encrypted disks to the GUI is antiX seems, for now at least, to be a personal project for the user.

Seaken64

See https://fosspost.org/linux-encryption-data-disk-security/

A quote on this site says: “Almost all Linux distributions do support disk encryption by default at the time of installation, such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, openSUSE… Almost all of them. “…

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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See also https://www.tecmint.com/file-and-disk-encryption-tools-for-linux/ and
https://averagelinuxuser.com/encrypt-hard-drive-in-linux/

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Brian Masinick

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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https://devconnected.com/how-to-encrypt-file-on-linux/ also discusses encryption.

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Brian Masinick

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