I have used the PGP product on Windows for MANY years. I run a VMWare virtual XP machine on my Ubuntu host for the primary purpose of running PGP to access encrypted PGP "virtual disk" files. Today, quite by accident, I discovered a Linux version of PGP Desktop on the upgrade download page. I have spent more than an hour with various departments at Symantec trying to find out the details on this product. They have no clue. So my questions are...

Does anyone here have any experience with PGP Desktop for Linux?

Any quick or automated way to transfer/convert PGP virtual disk files to TrueCrypt volume files? I have a LOT of DVD size PGP files of archive data and should probably move the data to TrueCrypt given the (lack of) support for PGP since it was acquired by Symantec.

TIA,

Ken

Read up on GPG

It inter-operates with PGP.

I get a daily feed from another company that encrypts with PGP, we de-crypt with GPG as the files come in.

I'm not so the virtual disk part though. But I do know the files are compatible.

Thanks tnrooster. I use GPG with Enigmail in Thunderbird. I know that I can exchange encrypted emails with a PGP user. However, the GPG documentation does not show any way to mount a PGP "virtual disk" file. Truecrypt has a similar feature. I can create an encrypted volume (file) and mount it. Unfortunately Truecrypt cannot read a PGP file. So I guess I would have to mount both a Truecrypt volume and a PGP disk in Windows and then move the data to the Truecrypt volume from PGP. Then I could access the data in the Truecrypt volume directly from Linux. What a pain

Ken

PGP has announced that the latest version of its PGP Desktop software will include versions compatible with the Apple OS and Linux.
Apple's OSX Snow Leopard and the Ubuntu and Red Hat Linux operating systems will now have versions of PGP's encryption tool for the first time. The company said that it had made the changes owing to the popularity of the systems.

Thanks jemesright,

I had (have?) about written off the commercial incarnation of PGP. When I spoke to their tech support folks about their Linux (several months ago) they were quite clueless. I have transferred all of my PGP disk data to TrueCrypt volumes and can thus access the data from either Linux or Windows (running as a VMWare virtual machine). I will have a look at what Symantec has to say. However, I may well go forward with Truecrypt alone.

Ken

Hello jemesright,

I just looked at your link again. It is dated January 2010 which predates my original post. I just contacted Symanted by chat (no clue, "try calling enterprise customer support"), enterprise customer support ("that is a technical support issue"), tech support - supposed to be emailing me links to some information (and "you need to contact licensing department").

Ken

Well after initiating a chat with Symantec customer support and being told to call enterprise customer service then being transfered to tech support (which disconnected me) and calling tech support back and receiving an email from tech support with links to Linux information (which contained no Linux information) and calling tech support back and being referred to sales who checked with "engineers" who were able to come back with the fact that Symantec PGP offers full disk encryption on Linux - nothing more. I knew more than that 6 months ago. What a bunch of bone heads.

So I would say that Truecrypt, GPG and built in encryption services in most Linux distros provide the answer to this thread.

Ken

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