I was listening to the Ubuntu UK podcast yesterday, and they were talking about how to do encryption, either full or partial, to protect the data on your computer from being stolen and used against you should the machine itself be lost or stolen.

But the pain of buying a new computer pales in the face of losing the data from an unprotected laptop. A few simple steps toward data protection can avoid an invasion of your privacy and the real likelihood of identity theft.

Almost every laptop on sale today comes equipped with the Kensington security slot on the side or back, through which you can connect a theft-deterring locked steel cable. As an alternative, the free software utility Adeona won't preemptively deter theft, but it will help you track down your stolen equipment and better the chances of its recovery by police.

TrueCrypt is free software that encrypts data “on-the-fly”. You can create an encrypted hard drive, a separate partition or a directory. TrueCrypt is portable -- it works on GNU/Linux and Windows. Worried about losing your valuable data when your laptop gets stolen? Don't wait and encrypt your data now!

Laptop and notebooks are being stolen at an ever-increasing rate. In 2004, Safeware Insurance which sells computer insurance, estimated 600,000 laptop and notebooks a year were being stolen.

Car owners know all about LoJack, the service that can use a hidden box to help find your car when it’s lost or stolen, and techies know that it’s also available for laptop computers. But what do you do if you’d really rather not use proprietary software? Or maybe you’d just rather not let a centralized server, which could get hacked, to have info about you and your laptop?... Enter Adeona

I looked back in the blog, and I began running Debian Lenny as my main desktop distribution just about two months ago. Debian is snappy, as it has always been for me, even with GNOME. I don't even see any performance issues due to using fully encrypted LVM. And with that encryption on my laptop, any anxiety over it being lost or stolen is gone.

Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service.

The XO laptop (of the One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative) is an inexpensive laptop project intended to help educate children around the world. The laptop includes many innovations, such as a novel, inexpensive, and durable hardware design and the use of GNU/Linux® as the underlying operating system. The XO also includes an application environment written in Python with a human interface called Sugar, accessible to everyone (including kids). Explore the Sugar APIs and learn how to develop and debug a graphical activity in Sugar using Python.