I haven't used TrueCrypt since well before upgrading to Hardy about a month ago, but the new version is a nightmare to me. Everything pops up GUIs now. I know about -t, but even just asking for help in the shell now requires:
I feel this is patently ridiculous, being the only shell tool I use now that requires a special option not to go GUI. But that's just the beginning. I used to use -M to pass in shortname=mixed, to fix filename problems in my volumes, but that option is gone, seemingly replaced by --fs-option=OPTIONS, which errors on attempting to pass this in, quoted or not. This means I can no longer write in files without borking things like their filename cases.Code:truecrypt -t -h
I can no longer use TrueCrypt easily in my many automation scripts, as (aside from having to go change about 35 lines of calls in my .bashrc functions to try (and fail miserably) to fix the now wildly out-of-format options), it also asks me for keyfile, and hidden file protection options after entering the password. The latter of those two seems ludicrous to me. That's the one option intended to guard against rubber hose attacks - one of their highlight features - and now it blatantly announces to whomever may be looking over your shoulder that there might be a hidden volume! I have no clue what the developers are thinking anymore. Both of those options should be as they were - options specified by the user on the command line if they matter. It seems this was added to help interactively aid newbs, but they're not going to understand what either of those things means anyway, if they're not yet clever enough to use those features, and it means the 20+ times a day I'm logging into and out of my volumes, I'm having to do extra, pointless steps that will never apply to me. I suppose I could flag these issues away, but that means that when I'm not working with automated scripts, I'm typing out lines of options to fix what's now IMNSHO broken.
I feel like TrueCrypt is devoting itself to being great for Windows, and MacOS needs, and it's sort of kicking us 'power users' on Linux to the curb. And that's fine, I'll head elsewhere. But where exactly is elsewhere? Ideally I want almost no options at all. I liked the concept of making encrypted containers, but AES only is fine with me. I don't care about keyfiles, nor hidden volumes, nor any of that extra stuff. I just want to safeguard files on my home drives, in case the machine gets stolen, and on my USB keychain, in case I lose it. I also want something that exposes every option - creation, encryption, decryption - on the command line in a simple way, and honestly, I could care less about a UI. They aren't helpful to me, and the addition of one to TC on Linux seems to have broken just about everything I cared about. Here's the rough part: I need this to work on Windows, too. That's one huge reason I loved TC. It let me bring my pendrive between home (Ubuntu), and work (XP) with no hassle.
I know I can use the also-enormous --non-interactive flag so I don't have to enter the keyfile, and protection stuff, too, but then it errors out on no password, meaning it wants me to pass in my password as plaintext from the shell, meaning it goes into my history, meaning forget that.
I really hate when open source software does this to me. Thanks for any help, or pointers about getting TrueCrypt to go back to a time before it was this mess.
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Originally Posted by hyper_ch
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