Quoting Mathew Brown mathewbrown@fastmail.fm:

I was wondering if it was possible to install grml on an encrypted root partition and with an encrypted swap partition.

Yes, no problem!

I plan on installing grml on an external USB drive and since it can be stolen so easily, I'd rather protect my data using encryption. So is this possible?

Yes too ;). If you only want to protect your data, ecryptfs only for your data would imho the best option (ecryptfs is a stacked cryptfs, so no special cryptocontainer is needed).

According to http://grml.org/grml2hd/grml2hd.html this can't be done but that web page hasn't been updated since Jan. 2006. Any ideas?

grml2hd doesn't support this directly, but it is easy to upgrade a grml with many different encryption schemas.

If you want real encrypted root you should use cryptsetup-luks, so every single bit except /boot is encrypted on your stick (/boot has to be on a seperate partition). Just create the encrypted partition and install with grml2hd on it (afterwards you need to configure grml to be able to boot from it) [1].

If you want to protect your sensitiv private data just use ecryptfs on the folders you want to encrypt.

Encrypted swap is just 2 lines of config ;)[2].

[1]: /usr/share/doc/cryptsetup/README.initramfs.gz [2]: /usr/share/doc/cryptsetup/CryptoSwap.HowTo

cu, michael