Hi,
For anyone interested, a release candidate of Tails 0.11 will be
released for your testing pleasure some time around 01:00 UTC tonight
(the exact time depends a bit on how well-configured our mirrors rsync
cronjobs are this time). It will be available from the following address:
http://dl.amnesia.boum.org/tails/testing/tails-i386-0.11-rc1/tails-i386-0.11-rc1.iso
The signature can be found here:
http://dl.amnesia.boum.org/tails/testing/tails-i386-0.11-rc1/tails-i386-0.11-rc1.iso.pgp
Tails 0.11-rc1 has three *big* new features that needs heavy testing:
* Tails Greeter, the login screen which obsoletes the language selection
boot menu, as well as adding some new options:
- Activating persistence (see below).
- Setting a sudo password. Unlike earlier Tails releases, full sudo
access via an empty password is not available any more. In fact,
full sudo access is disabled per default, but can be enabled by
setting this password.
* Tails USB installer. This GUI obsoletes our old instructions of
dd/cat:ing the .iso directly onto a block device, which was never
very user friendly (incidentally this releases is no longer an
isohybrid which hopefully will make Tails bootable on more systems).
All of the USB drive must be dedicated to Tails; a bit of extra space
is reserved so that future Tails releases will fit when upgrading,
and the rest can be used for persistence (see below) or manually
formatted if the user so wishes. You find this tool in:
Applications -> Tails -> Tails USB Installer
* Persistence can optionally be used when running Tails from a USB
drive. In the persistence setup tool you first choose a passphrase
(for the encryption), and then you choose which application
configurations you want to be made persistent. Running it again will
allow you to change the configuration. The configuration tool can be
found in:
Applications -> Tails -> Configure persistent storage
Once configured, Persistence can then optionally be activated it Tails
Greeter on subsequent boots. The persistent media can optionally be
mounted read-only (any changes to you persistent files will only
happen in RAM).
Happy testing!
------
Below are my current findings while testing this RC:
Since our test suite lacks instructions for testing Tails Greeter, the
Tails USB installer and persistence I ran some ad-hoc tests, all with
positive results:
* Setting a sudo password.
* Fresh USB install.
* Adding persistence to said fresh install.
* Testing all presistence presets.
* Custom persistent directories.
* Persistence in read-only mode.
* Upgrade an old Tails USB installation to 0.11-rc1 running from DVD,
with existing TailsData partition still intact afterwards.
Here are some comments from the manual test suite (everything *not*
mentioned here worked perfectly):
> # Iceweasel
>
> * Does playing HTML5 videos work? In particular, (due to its popularity)
> do [youtube](http://www.youtube.com) videos work?
Clicking the NoScript box which grays out the <VIDEO> element is not
enough any more for starting the video. One has to use "NoScript icon ->
Blocked objects -> ..." and temporarily allow the *correct* object,
which is not easy to find (I just press randomly). This is not user
friendly at all :/. Tor bug #5266 [1]?
[1]
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5266
> # Whisperback
>
> * can a bug report e-mail be sent?
No connection could be made to the hidden service (and I tried several
times). We got a bug report two days ago, though, so has it just stopped
working again?
> * is it correctly encrypted?
N/A.
> # Monkeysphere
>
> * Monkeysphere validation agent key search/receive: torified? uses
> configured keyserver?
I'm still unsure of how to test this. I visited several https pages, but
never did I see the pgp keyserver onion listed in vidalia at the same time.
> # erase memory on shutdown
>
> Testing that the needed files are really mapped in memory, and the
> erasing process actually works, involves slightly more complicated
> steps that are worth [[a dedicated page|test/erase_memory_on_shutdown]].
Expectedly bad results since we're still on an i486 kernel using sdmem
(~1.5 GB unwiped memory out of 4 GB).
> # I2P
Works well, *if* you can manage to start it. Unfortunately I screwed up
and added the wrong script to sudoers so you'll need to set a sudo
password in tails-greeter and use it to start I2P. (Fix committed in
e2e6240.)
> # Misc
>
> * Check that all seems well during init (mostly that all services
> start without errors), and that dmesg seems ok.
During init:
startpar: services(s) retured failure: live-boot ...
I can't tell why, but it doesn't seem like this has any implications.
AFAIK it's only used for doing extra live-boot:esque stuff once it's
stopped once the system is shutting down, but it seems of little (?)
importance to us.
