I've spent quite a bit of time over the last 5 months developing, testing, documenting, and blogging about this feature.
Some people have asked, "What do you keep in your encrypted ~/Private directory?" So I thought I'd respond here. If there happen to be an other planet.ubuntu.com bloggers out there using an Encrypted Private Directory, perhaps this should be our next MeMe :-)
kirkland@t61p:~/Private$ ls -alF
total 40
drwx------ 10 kirkland kirkland 4096 2008-10-03 09:03 .xchat2/ drwx------ 2 kirkland kirkland 4096 2008-10-01 13:31 .ssh/drwx------ 6 kirkland kirkland 4096 2008-10-03 10:28 .purple/drwx------ 4 kirkland kirkland 4096 2008-02-14 06:59 .mozilla/drwx------ 2 kirkland kirkland 4096 2008-10-03 09:54 .gnupg/drwx------ 5 kirkland kirkland 4096 2008-10-03 10:30 .evolution/drwx------ 4 kirkland kirkland 4096 2008-10-03 10:23 Documents/drwx------ 95 kirkland kirkland 4096 2008-10-03 10:24 ../drwx------ 10 kirkland kirkland 4096 2008-10-03 10:30 ./
To protect your sensitive data, such as documents, mail, calendars, contacts, browser cache, messaging logs, and encryption keys in Intrepid, you can simply do the following:
Install ecryptfs-utils
Make sure that the application whose data you want to protect (e.g. Firefox or Evolution) is not running
I could provide a script to do this, however, care must be taken that applications are not reading and writing data to these directories while they're being moved, and thus, I recommend that these be handled manually.$ sudo apt-get install ecryptfs-utils
Setup your private directory$ ecryptfs-setup-private
Enter your login password, and either choose a mount pass phrase or generate oneRecord both pass phrases in a safe location!!! They will be required if you ever have to recover your data manually.
Logout, and Log back in to establish the mountMake sure that the application whose data you want to protect (e.g. Firefox or Evolution) is not running
$ ps -ef | grep evolution
Move the application's data directory (e.g. ~/.mozilla or ~/.evolution) into your ~/Private directorymv ~/.evolution ~/Private
Establish a symbolic link from the old location to new locationln -s ~/Private/.evolution ~/.evolution
Note: If you put all of .ssh in ~/Private, you won't be able to ssh into the system using public key authentication. In this case, you might want to only put your private key in ~/Private, and leave the rest in the clear.
Please open any bugs or ask any questions in Launchpad.
:-Dustin


Thanks Dustin :)