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View Full Version : introducing zuluMount,an alternative to udisks and friends for mounting solution.



mhogomchungu
May 18th, 2013, 05:29 AM
Greetings to all members of this community.I hope my post will not be taken as spamming the forum as that is not my intent,my intent is to introduce my project in a hope that it will be useful to members of this community.

Permission to introduce myself,i am the founder and current maintainer of a project called "zuluCrypt" hosted at: http://code.google.com/p/zulucrypt/

The link to zuluMount-gui screenshots are at the end of page.

zuluMount is a front end to zuluCrypt and its purpose is to give a simple to use CLI and GUI Desktop environment/file manager independent solution for mounting of encrypted as well as unencrypted volumes.Currently supported encrypted volumes are truecrypt volumes and cryptsetup's plain and luks volumes.

It does not use polkit authorization mechanism and does not require d-bus to work and hence can be a good alternative for those who do not like these two components for whatever reason.

It can be used as an alternative to GUI application to manage truecrypt volumes.Truecrypt application is released under questionable license and some distributions prefer not to include it[1][2]

It has a command line component that is better suited for third party developers than udisks as udisks prefers it not to be used by third party developers whose work is not tied up to desktop environments[3]

It being independent of Desktop environments or file managers makes it an ideal single solution for those who constantly switch DE or file managers as the same tool can be in across them.

It being about to deal with encrypted volumes as well as non encrypted volumes makes it a "one stop mounting solution"

I am the founder and current maintainer of the project just though i should mention it here to increase its awareness as i think there need to be more tools like it.All tools that have the same functionality are usually bolted on file managers or desktop environment making them not easily accessible outside of them.

A tool with the same independence is udevil[5] but the independence is only at the CLI since its GUI frontend is tied to SpaceFM[6]

[1]https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Forbidden_items?rd=ForbiddenItems#TrueCrypt

[2]https://tails.boum.org/todo/provide_a_migration_path_from_truecrypt/

[3]http://udisks.freedesktop.org/docs/latest/udisks.8.html

[4]http://ignorantguru.github.io/udevil/

[5]http://ignorantguru.github.io/spacefm/


Will appreciate any comment you may have and thanks for giving me this opportunity to discuss my project with this community.

mhogomchungu
June 1st, 2013, 03:45 PM
just thought i should drop a line to inform of a new version.

interesting features added in this version is more support for truecrypt volumes.
It is now possible to create normal as well as hidden truecrypt volumes using a "naked" key or a keyfile
It is now possible to open either a normal or a truecrypt hidden volume using a "naked" key or a keyfile

The download page is at:
http://code.google.com/p/zulucrypt/downloads/list (http://code.google.com/p/zulucrypt/downloads/detail?name=zuluCrypt-4.6.3.tar.bz2&can=2&q=#makechanges)

For the curious among us on how the GUI components look like,screenshots are at:
http://code.google.com/p/zulucrypt/wiki/zuluMount_screenshots
http://code.google.com/p/zulucrypt/wiki/zuluCrypt_screenshots

For the curious among us on how the backend,CLI components interact with one another,an overview explanation is at:
http://code.google.com/p/zulucrypt/wiki/backend_achitectural_over_view

One of those "nice to have features" is that its now possible to start mounting a volume residing in a file simply by dragging and dropping the file in the GUI component.