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Someone who's spent more than three hours trying to get it to work posted the following on truecrypt's forums:
PostPosted: 15 Mar 2008 Sat 00:15 [Link to This Post] [Report to Admin] Reply with quote
Before I begin my review of Truecrypt 5.1, You should know that I am not new to encryption. I have been using truecrypt 4.3 first on windows and then on linux with good results. Everything I do on this machine is automatically encrypted after login. While truecrypt without a gui was difficult to use at first, as I learned the commands it actually became easier and more efficient to use. Always, I found it to be fast, responsive and seamless.
Today, I installed truecrypt 5.1 on an older machine, to test it out. The experience has been so unforgivably horrible, that I have had to revert to 4.3 just to accomplish the most basic of tasks. I found myself writing a list of everything wrong with this version so as not to forget something.
As a linux user, there is a lot to find attractive in version 5. For example, Mounted volumes appear in the side pane of Nautilus. The graphical user interface has been ported from windows. When selecting a drive to encrypt, the GUI will list the size of each partition preventing the horrible of mistake of typing /dev/sdb instead of /dev/sdc. However, if you don't want to use the GUI you will have to type truecrypt -t before every command. This quickly gets tiresome. If I wanted to launch the GUI, I wouldn't have typed $truecrypt in the command line, would I. This became so tiresome that I was forced to create a wrapper to prevent the damned little GUI windows from launching every time I did anything in the command line.
If you are confused about any of the new features in truecrypt, don't expect to go to the man pages. What once existed in truecrypt 4.3 seems to have been erased. The 'Help' function doesn't work either. Other annoyances to add to the list: 1. The icon for truecrypt that appears in the sytem tray, disappears the moment you close the program. 2. Double clicking on a drive is supposed to open a file explorer window of the drive. It doesn't even fail, it just sits there doing nothing. 3. $truecrypt -d # doesn't appear to work anymore. 4. Even in text mode, you will have to dismiss more questions to accomplish basic tasks. 5. I couldn't mount unformatted volumes from the command line. (more on this in a bit)
These annoyances are not the worst of it. The structure of truecrypt has been so fundamentally altered that I couldn't even do a relatively simple task: create an XFS encrypted volume on an external drive.
After creating the encrypted volume, I attempted to load it so I could make the XFS filesystem. ( Why truecrypt can't give me this option when I first created the volume is a mystery to me. only the FAT filesystem is available) After typing in my long password, truecrypt refused to let me load it because the partition had no filesystem. Of course it doesn't! I haven't formatted it yet! Instead of letting me mount it anyway I had to type in the entire password again, but this time click the button more options and select "do not mount." Grr.
I opened Gparted, my favorite disk formatting utility, but it seems truecrypt has changed the way it works. Instead of mount volumes on /dev/truecrypt? It now mounts them on /dev/loop? This means that truecrypt volumes don't show up in Gparted anymore. It also destroys all old scripts that I had built to work with truecrypt. "Okay", I thought, I'll just have to use the command line $mkfs -t xfs /dev/loop? This work for the first few innodes, but then stalled on 28/1100. "Stalled" is to weak a word, it completely FROZE the entire computer forcing me to do a hard reboot.
Regardless, I pressed on. I created the XFS filesystem using a different computer that still had the GOOD truecrypt installed. Then, I mounted the volume with BAD truecrypt and attempted to copy some files. It was 60 MiB in when it completely FROZE the computer once again. I watched as the time remaining counter started count up. The message box was saying 400 HOURS estimated before I had enough and did a hard reboot again. It's as if the entire driver has been rewritten and the result is EPIC FAIL. This reminds me of the problems experienced by Windows Vista users.
By this point, I had had enough. I reinstalled truecrypt 4.3 and did everything I mentioned earlier. The volume formatted flawlessly and the file copy only took a few minutes. Suffice it to say, I will not be going back anytime soon. The minor annoyances, I could have worked around for the easy use of the GUI. But to fail so completely at the most basic task. That is simply unforgivable.
Current Mood: 
frustrated
frustrated