Tails developers have announced earlier, February 25, 2016, the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the first RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Tails 2.2 amnesic incognito live system.
According to the release notes, one major new feature implemented in this first Release Candidate build of Tails 2.2 is the replacement of the abandoned Vidalia cross-platform GUI for controlling Tor with the more modern and supported Tor Status GNOME Shell extension for viewing when the Tor network is ready and Onion Circuits for monitoring Tor circuits.
There are, of course, a bunch of security improvements in this version, such as the addition of the libdvdcss2 library for watching DRM-protected DVD videos, the ability to automatically save KeePassX databases after each change, implementation of the Tor stream isolation for WhisperBack, and I2P 0.9.24-1~deb8u+1.
The unused cks-mua.conf configuration file from Claws Mail has been deleted, and Git is now used to verify the integrity of transferred objects. The "set -u" option has been added to all gettext:ized shell scripts, and the "set -e" option has been introduced to various shell scripts that should have had it a long time ago.
Security fixes and bugfixes
Being synchronized with the upstream Debian 8 (Jessie) repositories, Tails 2.2 Release Candidate 1 ships with the latest security fixes, such as cpio 2.11+dfsg-4.1+deb8u1, glibc 2.19-18+deb8u3, libgraphite2 1.3.5-1~deb8u1, LibreOffice 4.3.3-2+deb8u3, and libssh2 1.4.3-4.1+deb8u1.
Last but not least, several bugs that were reported by users since the previous release, Tails 2.0.1, have been resolved. Among these, we can mention that the "Laptop Mode Tools Configuration" menu entry is now hidden by default, and a missing argument has been added to the OpenPGP dialog for adding the optional key again.
If you want to help the Tails developers discover more bugs before the final release gets out, you can download the Tails 2.2 RC1 ISO image right now via our website, write it on a USB stick, and boot it from the BIOS of your computer. However, we don't recommend using this version for production use.
