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.

  1. Settings specific to Tails
  2. Debian Live settings
  3. $HOME

Settings specific to Tails

The settings that can be customized can be found in config/variables.

Debian Live settings

Tails is based on Debian Live. Nearly everything can thus be customized. To learn how to do so, refer to the Debian Live manual 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:

  1. edit the content of config/chroot_local-includes/etc/skel/
  2. 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.)