I run slackware and Im a bit paranoid about people accessing my home dirctories, If I was to used a live Distro like knoppix, could I access the home directories? Also if I placed my hard drive containing the home folders into another linux system, would that be able to read them?

If so, could someone point me in the right direction to secure the drive.

thanks

Yep, anyone with physical access to your computer can boot up in single user mode, and do whatever they like.

If you need to keep your home directory private, you need to look into file system encryption.

the program you need is called cryptsetup.
use the newer dm-crypt driver instead of the old crypt-o-loop.
you will need a 2.6 kernel.

there are many cryptsetup tutorials floating around, use the search function or google.

Thanks, thats exactly what Im after.

In general is it hard to setup? I will read about it, no need to get into detail.

and would this effect performance, for games etc?

Only your home partiton is encrypted, so performance when working on large files in your home directory will be effected.

For example, if you were trying to author a DVD which was saved in the home partiton, performance would be a little slower, (unless you first coppied the dvd into the /tmp/ folder.

In other words, No, performance will be un-effected.

Is it hard to setup....Not really, but i suppose it cvhanges depening on how new you are to linux.

You will probably also want to setup pam_mount.
This is a program capable of using your normal login passwerd to de-crypt your home partiton when you loggin, and automatically lock the partiton when you log out.

it works like so...
lets say you have a encrypted home partiton on /dev/hda4 (OR en encrypted disk image on /home/myHome.encrypted)

when you login, anouther /dev/ node is created in /dev/mapper/yourHome
this node knows your password, when mount it, then write to your home partiton, anything you write is on the fly transparently encrypted and stored to your encrypted home... anything you read is on the fly decrytped from the encrypted home.

In other words, once its setup, you dont even notice any differance, other than your home partiton is completely empty untill you loggin with the correct password.