Light and efficient file encryption for Ubuntu.

"I would suggest you make life slightly easier by encrypting your home directories rather than home partition, and ecryptfs would be the best tool to do this.

If you do wish to encrypt your entire home partition, this article shows how to dot using LUKS, DM-Crypt and cryptsetup. I can't vouch for the performance, but from what I've seen of most Linux solutions, they are quite usable even on older machines."

I use encfs under Ubuntu on several machines including a netbook, and notice no slowdown at all. It works as a nested fuse filesystem, basically encrypting a directory and allowing it to be mounted in another directory. There are also tools available to auto-mount this at login, etc. TrueCrypt offers something similar, where you can create an encrypted container and mount it as well. I find both methods quite light on processor usage.