Compiling EncFS for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron)

The Task

You are doing user-space filesystem encryption. You want to use a more recent version of EncFS than the one provided in the Ubuntu 8.04 repositories. No problem, just compile one yourself.

The Problem

The most recent version in the EncFS will not compile on Ubuntu 8.04. Version r53 12/7/09 configure.ac breaks with:

checking whether xattr interface takes additional options... no
./configure: line 24466: syntax error near unexpected token 'newline'

This issue has been reported to the EncFS maintainer, in the interim, you can compile a fairly recent version by following the steps below.

Reference Links

• http://www.arg0.net/encfs
• http://code.google.com/p/encfs/source/checkout

Preparation

Get the build tools

sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake1.9 libtool gettext \
                     cvs pkg-config

Verify the kernel has FUSE support

cat /proc/filesystems | grep fuse

you should see something like this:

nodev   fuse
        fuseblk
nodev   fusectl

Install EncFS dependencies

sudo apt-get install libboost-dev libboost-filesystem-dev \
                     libboost-serialization-dev libfuse-dev \
                     fuse-utils librlog-dev libssl-dev

Building

Build version SVN r50 (f97ae2780) by pulling down with git and checking out the most recent version that will compile on Ubuntu 8.04

    cd ~/src

    git-svn clone --no-metadata  http://encfs.googlecode.com/svn/trunk encfs
    cd encfs
    git checkout -b work_around_build f97ae2780

    autoreconf -if
    ./configure
    make
    sudo make prefix=/usr install

Done!