Releases

The following changes were introduced in Tails 3.10.1:

  • Hide the PIM option when unlocking VeraCrypt volumes because PIM won't be supported until Tails 4.0. (#16031)

  • Rename the buttons in the confirmation dialog of Tails Installer to Install (or Upgrade) and Cancel to be less confusing. (#11501)

Code

We finalized our work on the Additional Software feature. Small bugfixes will be shipped in the next release.

We are very proud that our work to unlock VeraCrypt volumes has landed in GNOME and is being included in other distributions, as mentioned in the release announcement of Ubuntu Cosmic Cuttlefish.

Distributing USB images

We started working on distributing USB images which will make installing Tails much easier on Windows and macOS:

  • We have a first version of the code to transform ISO images into USB images (#15293).

  • We wrote the instructions to install an USB image on Debian using GNOME Disks (#15659) and Windows (#15808) and macOS (#15809) using Etcher.

This work will be released in Tails 3.12 (January 29).

Documentation and website

  • We updated our roadmap for the next 2 years.

Hot topics on our help desk

  1. Several users reported #14754, Keyboard and mouse do not work after upgrading, but that was fixed in Tails 3.10.1.

  2. Many users are suffering from #15978 and are unable to automatically install software on their persistence, sometimes after interrupting the upgrade process.

Infrastructure

  • Following-up on a process started in September, we were able to give more Tails developers access to our Jenkins CI platform. This should make their work more pleasurable and efficient.

  • We made great progress on our new DIY low-power backup server. We received the hardware, had great fun with Dremel tools and epoxy resin to make everything fit into the case, and finally installed the operating system. And what about… pictures? Here they are! :)

  • We did most of the work that will allow us to remove the outdated Gitolite instance we run on one of our systems. (#14587)

  • We ordered new drives to expand the storage capacity of our main server. (#16041)

Funding

We launched our yearly donation campaign and raised 18% of our goal in the first 2 weeks.

Outreach

Past events

Translation

All the website

  • de: 51% (3148) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 45% words translated
  • es: 58% (3593) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 48% words translated
  • fa: 32% (1993) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 34% words translated
  • fr: 88% (5412) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 87% words translated
  • it: 33% (2063) strings translated, 4% strings fuzzy, 29% words translated
  • pt: 26% (1622) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 22% words translated

Total original words: 64357

Core pages of the website

  • de: 83% (1580) strings translated, 8% strings fuzzy, 83% words translated
  • es: 97% (1851) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 96% words translated
  • fa: 32% (615) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy, 31% words translated
  • fr: 98% (1872) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 98% words translated
  • it: 70% (1337) strings translated, 13% strings fuzzy, 69% words translated
  • pt: 45% (859) strings translated, 12% strings fuzzy, 48% words translated

Total original words: 17343

Metrics

We wrote some code on the download page to compute download metrics in the future. (#14922).

  • Tails has been started more than 743,676 times this month. This makes 23,990 boots a day on average.
  • 10,158 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
  • 117 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.