TrueCrypt, a good strong encryption software package, itself claims to be open source, although this claim isn’t accepted by the Open Source Institute or any of the major distributions, including SuSE, Fedora, or Ubuntu, so it’s not easily available using the usual package installation/upgrade mechanisms.

TrueCrypt is a useful application though; so how do you get it?

For Ubuntu 10.10, here’s what worked for me. (Note that there is a Debian packaging utility for Truecrypt source if you want to roll your own.)  I downloaded standard package, which today is version 7.0a, from the TrueCrypt download page and unpacked the tarred and gzipped installer using Archive Manager.  Then I double-clicked on the installer — which is not standard behavior — and selected ‘Run,’ which successfully launched an installation process which ended up with TrueCrypt in the Accessories category of my Applications menu. Alternatively, you could navigate to the folder in the terminal and run “./truecrypt-7.0a-setup-x86” which does the same thing.

(Sorry for the nerd-post, but I had trouble figuring this out and thought it might save someone some time.  I’ll get back to Sanskrit and fish tanks real soon now.)