Software Update: Tails 4.17

Tails stands for “The amnesic incognito live system” and is a live Linux distribution that focuses on privacy and anonymity. It uses Debian GNU/Linux as its base and adds a Gnome environment with Tor, Tor Browser, Pidgin, Thunderbird, Electrum, LibreOffice, GPG and KeePassXC. For more information, please refer to this page. The development team has released version 4.17 with the following changes and improvements:

Reliability improvements to automatic upgrades

• Repair automatically the file system used during upgrades.
  Automatic upgrades were sometimes failing even after doing a manual upgrade because of an unclean file system. (#17902)
• Resume automatically when the download of an upgrade fails.

Other changes and updates

• Update Tor Browser to 10.0.14.
• Update Thunderbird to 78.8.0.
• Update Tor to 0.4.5.7.
• Update GRUB to 2.04-16.
• Update some firmware packages. This should improve the support for some Wi-Fi interfaces, especially Intel, Broadcom, and Cypress interfaces.

Fixed problems

• Improve the error message when starting the Unsafe Browser while offline. (#12251)
  For more details, read our changelog.

Known issues

• Automatic upgrades are broken from Tails 4.14 and earlier.
  To upgrade from Tails 4.14 or earlier, you can either:
  • do a manual upgrade.
  • Fix the automatic upgrade from a terminal. To do so:
  • Start Tails and set up an administration password.
  • In a terminal, execute the following command: torsocks curl –silent https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/raw/master/config/chroot_local-includes/usr/share/tails/certs/ lets-encrypt-r3.pem | sudo tee –append /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs/tails.boum.org-CA.pem && systemctl –user restart tails-upgrade-frontend

    This command is a single command that wraps across several lines. Copy and paste the entire block at once and make sure that it executes as a single command.

  • Approximately 30 seconds later, you should be prompted to upgrade to the latest version of Tails. If no prompt appear, you might already be running the latest version of Tails.

See the list of long standing issues.