Useful for Jaunty Jackalope

Performance tweaks, different update servers, OpenOffice.org 3, Dropbox... Windows fonts and codecs

New to Ubuntu 8.10 is a nifty seamless encryption feature. It's always been possible to encrypt individual files/folders in Ubuntu but it involved creating a key pair and then individually encrypting files. To view or edit the file, it was necessary to decrypt it and then re-encrypt it again if changes were made. Messy.

The new feature creates an encrypted filestore, mounted in the Private folder in your /home directory. This is automatically locked and unlocked as you log in and out, so accessing it is seamless and transparent. Other users won't be able to access it, and it isn't possible to see its contents by booting into rescue mode.

To activate the feature, just type the following two commands:

sudo apt-get install ecryptfs-utils
ecryptfs-setup-private

Follow the prompts shown and then log out and back in again. Once the desktop reappears, you'll see a new Private directory in your /home folder, where you can save data, as with any other directory.

Mark: you'll obviously be dualbooting, but this should be helpful, even if it was written with Ubuntu 6.04, not the latest 8.10.

Coming with Ubuntu 9.04 will be official images/isos for all sorts of netbooks.

There is an actual Ubuntu CE.