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

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.)