Securing your laptop
I assume that you store things on your laptop that you do not want other people to read. Especially, you may store important accounting information about your bank etc in cache files or config files. A laptop is also more probable to be stolen than a normal desktop machine. Therfore you may want to encrypt your home directory and swap partition. Ideally you encrypt everything except /boot. There is a good how to in the Ubuntu wiki . It explains how to to things in a breath perspective. I followed those instructions and complemented with usages of pam_mount. The pam_mount module automatically mounts your encrypted home directory when you login and uses your password as the encryption key. Encrypting the swap is straight forward from the wiki, therefore I will not write more about it here. To encrypt your home directory you have to do some extra things, that may not be too easy to read from the wiki. I will try to point out things I think might need to be clarified. I use LVM to handle ...