I am looking for a way to password protect a folder. My original thought was to set the permissions of that folder to only be viewable by the owner and change the owner to a new user other than myself.

But after trying this approach I can't find an easy way to change to that user from dolphin or konqueror. Is there any easy way to switch users in dolphin or do you have to launch a dolphin from terminal with su?

Also if anyone knows of any other good ways to protect a folder that would be great also.

The reason you cannot change the ownership to another user is because users are not normally permitted to change the ownership of their files and folders to other users. Only root is usually permitted to do this.

Perhaps a file based encrypted disk is what you are after. Truecrypt sounds like what you are after. I installed it to test it out, and it is pretty easy to use.

I think you misunderstood my question. I am fairly experienced in Linux and know my way around. I had no issue setting the permissions (It is my own machine and I have full root and sudo access), but the problem is that then I have no convenient way to view the files. As far as I can find there isn't a way to browse files in dolphin or such as a different user.

I tried using su -c to run dolphin as a different user but it doesn't bind to the X session and so I can't use it. I will use truecrypt if that is necessary, but I would prefer not to. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Have you tried running the applications through kdesu -u ? I just created another user, and was able to use that to run Konsole as them, without problems. I was able to run Dolphin as well, but any applications you want to run as them have to be run through kdesu, using kdesu to open a terminal, then executing Konqueror for instance does not work.

Thanks for the tip. That works but not quite in the way I would like. I think I'll just use TrueCrypt. Thank you for your help bcooksley.

No problem, If you believe this thread is solved then can you please add [SOLVED] to the start of the thread subject? Thanks in advance.