Compiling & Installing Truecrypt on Fedora 10

Truecrypt is a powerful, multi-platform encryption tool. However, only OpenSuse and Ubuntu packages are available for download at the Truecrypt web site. Those with other distributions must compile it themselves. This tutorial covers compiling and installing Truecrypt on Fedora 10 and assumes starting from a base OS install.

1. Download the Truecrypt source code from http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads2 (Mac OS X / Linux tar.gz file).
2. Copy the downloaded file to a folder of your choice and extract it: tar xzf truecrypt-file.tar.gz
3. cd into the new source code directory
4. Download the crypto header files by doing the following:
   wget ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-11/v2-20/pkcs11.h
   wget ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-11/v2-20/pkcs11f.h
   wget ftp://ftp.rsasecurity.com/pub/pkcs/pkcs-11/v2-20/pkcs11t.h
5. Make sure the necessary packages (and their dependencies) are installed:
   yum install gcc-c++ fuse-devel wxGTK-devel
6. make
7. If successful, the truecrypt executable should be in the Main folder. Move the executable to /usr/bin: mv Main/truecrypt /usr/bin (must be root)

You may want to install truecrypt executable on other computers without having to compile it on each computer. There may be occasions where you don't have web access to download the packages upon which truecrypt depends. Fortunately, the number of software packages that truecrypt is dependent upon to run is much smaller than the number necessary to compile it.

In addition to the newly truecrypt executable, you will need to include three software packages in the installation package:

• SDL
• wxGTK
• wxBase

Normally, the RPM files are not saved when installed by yum. This behavior can be changed by editing the /etc/yum.conf file and adding (or changing) the line "keepcache=1". Then, when installing (yum install SDL wxGTK wxBase), the RPMs are saved in the yum cache. The new RPMs can be in one of two cache locations:

• /var/cache/yum/fedora/packages
• /var/cache/yum/updates/packages

Once you have a compiled truecrypt executable and three RPMs, you can pop them on a thumb drive and install them on any other Fedora 10 computer by:

• Copying the truecrypt executable to /usr/bin
• yum install SDL...rpm wxBase...rpm wxGTK...rpm

Where the complete filenames for the SDL wxBase and wxGTK RPM files are listed.