Information on creating a live USB stick of Tails, a Debian-based Linux distribution that is portable and privacy-focused.

Background on the Tails Installation Process

There is some useful information on the installation process here: https://tails.boum.org/doc/first_steps/installation/index.en.html

Before you get started with Tails, you'll have to solve something of a chicken-and-the-egg problem: In order to install Tails on a USB stick, you need to run the Tails Installer. But the Tails Installer can only be run from within Tails.

Option 1: start by running a DVD version of Tails, which is read-only. Once you boot from this DVD version of Tails, you'll be able to run the Tails installer and install Tails onto a USB drive. This will enable you to have a version (optionally persistent) of Tails on a USB stick.

Option 2: manually install Tails to a USB stick without the Tails Installer.

I'll cover option number 2.

More details for doing this on a Mac here: https://tails.boum.org/doc/first_steps/installation/manual/mac/index.en.html

More details for doing this on Linux here: https://tails.boum.org/doc/first_steps/installation/manual/linux/index.en.html

Flash Image Onto USB Stick

Step 1: Download Image

First, download a Tails image from their website. It will be called tails-i386-1.4.1.iso or something similar.

MAKE SURE YOU GET THE MOST UP-TO-DATE VERSION, since as of just a few days ago (July 2015) 1.4.0 was found to be vulnerable and 1.4.1 was released.

Step 2: Plug In Your USB Drive

You can see your disks with fdisk:

$ fdisk -l

This will show you which device is your USB drive (/dev/sdc in my case.)

Step 3: Flash USB with Image

Note that this step assumes your flash drive is larger than 1 GB. I'm using an old 2 GB stick.

You'll use the dd command to flash the image onto the USB stick:

$ dd if=tails-i386-1.4.1.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=512k

The larger the block size, the faster it goes, but the more liable to become corrupted. Here's what the output will look like:

$ dd if=tails-i386-1.4.1.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=512k
1851+1 records in
1851+1 records out
970584064 bytes (971 MB) copied, 103.474 s, 9.4 MB/s

This took about 15 minutes on my system.

Step 4: Eject Tails Live USB

The disk won't be mounted when we're done flashing it, so we can pull it out of the slot when we're done.

Now it's time to take it for a test drive.

Tails Live USB on Mac OS X

You'll want to install rEFInd on Mac OS X, which is pretty easy to do, so that you can boot into multiple operating systems. I had already done that for my dual Mac OS X-Kali boot. So live-booting into a USB drive was no problem.

Notes on other live USB distros:

Tails Live USB

From charlesreid1

Contents