14 DAY TRIAL // The development team behind the Tails amnesic incognito live system project, known to many as the Linux-based Live CD used by ex-CIA employee Edward Snowden to stay hidden and anonymous online, has announced the release of Tails 2.6 RC1.
What's Tails 2.6 RC1? It's the first Release Candidate milestone in the development cycle of the next major version of the Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution, Tails 2.6, which should see the light of day sometime in mid-September, bringing many up-to-date technologies to keep users safe and secure while browsing the Internet.
There are numerous improvements since Tails 2.5, so we'll start with the biggest ones. Tails 2.6 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is based on TOR 0.2.8.6 to provide you with the best support for the Tor anonymous network, though the latest version is 0.2.8.7, and it should be implemented in the final Tails 2.6 release.
Moreover, the Icedove email and news client has been updated to version 45.2.0 based on Mozilla Thunderbird 45.2.0, of course, and it looks like the kernel packages have been rebased on the Linux 4.6 branch, which, unfortunately, reached end of life a few weeks back along with its latest maintenance update, version 4.6.7. However, the kernel comes with kASLR (Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization) enabled by default.
More Wi-Fi adapters and sound cards are supported
Also new in the first Release Candidate of Tails 2.6 is the implementation of extra packages, namely firmware-intel-sound and firmware-ti-connectivity, to support more Wi-Fi adapters and sound cards, the addition of the GNOME Sound Recorder utility from the GNOME Stack, as well as the import of the OpenPGP Applet from Debian GNU/Linux.
In other changes and improvements, we can notice that the "About Tails" dialog and boot-profile have been ported to Python 3, and there's better support for hardware RNG devices. Then, the vboxvideo X.Org driver will no longer be forced when running Tails in VirtualBox because it causes critical issues, and the non-free APT sources have been disabled at boot time.
"Only build the VirtualBox kernel modules for the 32-bit kernel. It's both hard and useless to build it for 64-bit in the current state of things, as long as we're shipping a 32-bit userspace. Also, install virtualbox-* from jessie-backports, since the version in Jessie is not compatible with Linux 4.x," reads the announcement.
You can download Tails 2.6 Release Candidate 1 right now via our website and take it for a test drive if you can't wait until its final launch on September 13, 2016. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, and it's not suitable for production use as it might contain bugs.