This page documents a bit how to build a custom system based on Tails.

The resulting system will effectively be a fork of Tails, that only you can support: do not expect any help from us about it.
Please consider having your changes merged into Tails instead.

Settings specific to Tails
Debian Live settings
$HOME

Settings specific to Tails

The settings that can be customized can be found in config/amnesia; e.g. desktop environment.

You'd better never directly edit this file: rather put your custom variable assignments in a new config/amnesia.local file. The values found in the .local file will override the ones from the upstream one.

These configuration files are actually shell scripts, and are sourced by various other scripts.

Debian Live settings

The Amnesic Incognito Live System is based on Debian Live. Nearly everything can thus be customized. To learn how to do so, refer to the Debian Live manual, website and wiki.

$HOME

Tails default user's $HOME directory is created at runtime from /etc/skel/. One may want to build an image including a modified version of it. There are multiple ways to do so:

edit the content of config/chroot_local-includes/etc/skel/
dropping shell scripts in config/chroot_local-hooks/ or config/chroot_local-includes/lib/live/config/ to modify /home/amnesia in a program-driven way (gconftool, etc.)