A distro for Developers, Sysadmins, Power users and Hackers interested in Privacy, Peer-to-Peer technology, and Sustainability.

First, more Obvious WARNING: I'm just a guy. I do this as a hobby. I'm not even employed as a computing professional. I'm pretty poor. I read. Free Documentation is also usually free of cost. So I read alot of manuals. Also secondhand textbooks from GoodWill. And Netflix, one of the only Non-Free services I use without trying very hard to produce an alternative for myself, only has so much so I fire up YouTube in a uzbl script which basically lets me treat it like a search engine for youtube-dl and watch videos from hacker cons. My point is that it's pretty audacious for me to try and put together a distro that addresses some set of security concerns. I study alot and that is literally it. I get profiled by incompetent department store security personnel and work a recycler for not much money. PLEASE don't get yourself killed doing something stupid with my configuration. Read it instead, and submit a pull request or email me if I screwed up and I'll fix it if it's me, or pass it upstream if it's an upstream package. I've borrowed alot of work from projects made by people who know better than me, probably, and I don't think I've done anything that will break that work. But I could very easily be wrong. That's the trouble with having no one to check your work yet. Note to self: Get on the Mempo ML.

In summary, if you're a power user who's prepared to take responsibility for his or her own configuration, then you might find this system useful as a basis for it. If you want to experiment with privacy technologies and don't have life, limb, or freedom threatening privacy concerns, then it may be good enough for you too. But if you have serious concerns and cannot otherwise evaluate your security concerns, then you should probably use TAILS or another more tried-and-true solution.

WARNING: If you install the system in it's current configuration, your user name will be exposed on the lightdm-gtk-greeter login screen. This is one less thing an attacker with local access who cannot compromise you with a keylogger needs to guess. If you choose to install the system to your hard drive and use it day-to-day, be sure to encrypt your hard disk and change.

    greeter-hide-users=false

into:

	greeter-hide-users=true

On the other hand, if you use the Live configuration then you are at least no better or worse off for the configuration, since all the live configurations use the same name by design. This may offer greater resistance to certain kinds of analysis. I don't think it's a good idea to change the name on the live configuration itself, although an argument might be made for the value of a cascade of configurations, so maybe, just maybe, and keep in mind all I do is read alot so who am I? Nobody that's who, but maybe releasing your custom live configuration only temporarily narrows your anonymity set(and that's kind of an overblown way of saying it, an attacker still still has to find someplace where you leak this information from a channel you think is secure and then do something with it.)

So right now, 2 things to think about. Do you want your username displayed on the greeter screen? Probably not. Maybe though. They would have to decrypt the disk, whatever TPM or coreboot situation you may have worked out, and anything else that happens before the greeter might be enough for you. Also, setting theusername breaks the amnesic property of the system and gives a characteristic that can be used to track it across some types of sessions if the user is already compromised or leaks information from a session. I've attempted to partially mitigate this through the use of multiple Tor circuits for different types of apps and using End-to-End encryption wherever available when on the clearnet, but this is imperfect and a MUCH BETTER WAY if you intend to use terminal tools over Tor is to separate your circuits by contextual identity (Any particular account getting a different Tor circuit would be an OK way to start) and the best way is to restart, boot into the LiveCD, and only use one Tor circuit for one thing then restart every time you change tasks. It's a spectrum.

Current Project: Switch from the default systemd init system in Debian Jessie to a more Gentoo-like init system using OpenRC instead of SysV-RC(thus keeping the only useful parts of systemd) and replacing other tightly integrated systemd components with their modular equivalents. Right now the build will set up SysVInit with SysV-RC, then replace SysV-RC with OpenRC. There remain a handful of issues with that process but the system is usable. Now I've got a successful build of vdev to use, not sure what to do about dbus, but Gentoo is obviously the pace to look there.

Current Project: Create an installable Allwinner A33 port with only Free Software that works on Q8 tablets. The trickiest part is building it with the Lima driver for the Mali GPU and the OpenFWWF for the brcmhd wireless chip, and frankly the systemd thing is probably going to be a bit of a quagmire. Maybe not though, I mean I'm doing the SysV/OpenRC thing now before I get in too deep so who knows?

I sometimes arbitrarily and without regard for the remaining problems really like anything and everything that aids in the decentralization of the internet and especially the functions usually carried out on social networks. To that end I plan to include uTox for instant messaging, Twisterd for microblogging, and and i2p for networking. I think that the ability to have a totally private and anonymous dialog should be easily available to everyone, and that it is wierd and creepy that I have to rely on a service provider to contact my friends and I think you should have a choice how much information you convey and peer-to-peer technology seems to make that a bit more realistic. It also includes some mesh-netwoking utilities and some security testing tools, eventually they(The security tools) will focus on testing distributed applications and mesh networks.

Some other packages that are likely to be included in the future are the Syndie distributed Forum/Blogging engine, the BitMessage e-mail replacement protocol, and a to-be-determined Bitcoin wallet. Gittorrent will also be in here once I figure out enough about how to make it work.

To anyone who stumbles across this and hopes to use it or some of the interesting software suggested therein, and I do encourage you to do so, please understand that I'm only human and I'm sorry if I've introduced some sort of error. If I did I did so unknowingly and without malice. On a similar note, please also understand that much of this software is still in very active development and is subject to fairly rapid change. Usually, everything works and you will hardly notice the updates, so much so that they're barely worth mentioning and these are smart folks, but hey you should know.

This is fun. I get to be really picky about what I want.

• Do less Battery life is rough. And it's an older laptop these days. Still sweet, but, you need to be really in charge of it to keep up with these newfangled things. And all that background crap in Gnome wasn't doing you any good. So you're going with awesome, and you're trying to do more with less pretty successfully because awesome is indeed, pretty awesome. And man it's nice to really know where your computer starts these background services up. And it's paid off. Battery life is better. Things are running faster. You're managing less software, which means a smaller footprint. You haven't made a good way to manage your keys without having to repeatedly retype passwords yet, but hey. At least it's asking you to do it. But there is a balance to be struck for you and you can find it and write something about how you found it that helps someone else find it. Status unknown. Right now the running system is not really in its pure state, but it's doing pretty well for as bloated as it is. I'm going to clean-slate it soon and we'll see.
• Decentralize all the things! Decentralizing stuff has come along nicely, but right now some of my custom versions of packages don't work. It'll just be a little while before I've got those back up. Right now, everything that is remotely worthwhile to do on facebook is now possible to do with decentralized techologies capable of end to end encryption, and that is overwhelmingly how I would prefer to do those things. Status, mostly done, momentarily broke. Oh also finish updating ratox.
• Make it Self-Hosting Technically this is a pretty easy property to have, since it's running mostly standard Debian packages and portable scripts, but I want to be able to make it easy for every package in the distro to be forked and uploaded to a new repository, then for that repository to be added to a fork of the live-build config, then rebuild the live-build in a standard, self-explanatory way. The workspace is located in the $HOME/Projects directory, and shortcuts to each part of the system is added to rc.lua, but some setup scripts would be in order next.
• Make it nice to use! I really liked some of Gnome3's features, and I really liked tiling window managers. So I made some rc.lua and other tweaks which reproduced the features I liked on top of awesome and approximated some aspects of it's interface. Now I'm integrating it with the user's personal environment and creating some management tools for it. There's a drop-down network manager interface, OS X style quick launch bar and Gnome3 style hot corner, and a Battery Monitor. Soon there will be an ssh-agent and gpg-agent management interface, all for awesomewm. A few shell scripts accompany them. Oh and a pretty cool looking conkyrc with a HUD-like pop-up interface. Throughout it I'm favoring dialog and curses based interfaces from the shell. Status? Pretty OK so far. Work in progress.
• Make it easy to customize the behavior! Where possible, use shell scripts and be concise. Don't set too many settings right off the bat, but make it easy and clear where it's safe to add some profile-wide variable or alias. Comment the files where those things get set when they aren't self-explanatory. Partly for your own benefit, you can't remember everything. Need to do that last part with the comments and the readmes and whatnot. Switch the fuck back to SysVInit.
• Harden it, including in some novel ways! Take that customizable behavior and the flexibility of the shell, combined with existing tools and configuration options and figure out how to turn the security up. Like disabling USB HID's and firewire when the screensaver engages to prevent attacks on the computer when the screen is locked. Give it a panic button that shuts it down immediately. Give it the ability to use encrypted configuration files that expose the minimum data. Give it some kind of "silent running" mode where it blocks all the stuff from item 1. Progress, who knows?
• Find ways to contribute software which can be used elsewhere! Some of it can be used elsewhere. But who knows. I'm just a prolific hobbyist. I like tinkering with this stuff. Old computers are everywhere, this setup lends itself to them. Like the crunchbang family, but with my setup on it. It'd be pretty easy to make it your setup instead, which is also kind of the idea. I want it to be easy to for somebody to make their own sort of custom ecosystem and maybe share it with other people or something, I don't know really. But it's fun.
• Libre Entertainment Find Free-As-In-Freedom, Public Domain, or otherwise consumer-controlled entertainment and bundle resources for retrieving it in the distribution. Magnet links in files mostly so they can be torrented with rtorrent or streamed from torrent sources with tribler. In the case of video games, package them if possible and patch them where required. Eventually GemRB is something I want here(I know it doesn't have free resources. Somebody should create some. I'm not a pixel artist or my game would be playable already. But hey, maybe someday. Wouldn't be the first time something clicked after a long time.) Status barely started. Only the hosts file arguably.
• Privacy Conscious Default Libre Browser Browsers are complicated and I don't reccommend anyone use my setups unless they really want to, but in seeking a lightweight, reasonably usable Tor Browser configuration I've stumbled across xombrero and configured it for use with Tor(And i2p, which is more exciting and frankly, the one I'm more comfortable with in this relatively unique configuration.). This will, however, probably make your browser more unique and fingerprintable. Your user agent will be changed to match the Tor Browser Bundle, but this is almost certainly inadequate to prevent browser fingerprinting attacks on its own, so scripting will be totally disabled in the default configuration. Your configuration will still probably be more unique than the Tor Browser Bundle, and you should be careful when using any kind of secure service. Still, I think it's a pretty nice and interesting config file. There's also the ability to install the torbrowser-launcher application from the backports repository.
• Held for now project Making a Debian package which installs and configures gittorrent system-wide and configures the init system for gittorrentd. Right now it's installed with a hook that activates the npm package. I might just have a post-install script invoke the npm command to install gittorrent in a package. It's a shitty way to do it but I hate Javascript so much.

A number of custom packages are used to configure this system.

###Svirfneblin I've named my awesomewm configuration, which is a combination of rc.lua and widgets/configurations in separate folders, svirfneblin. I also made a wrapper around awesomewm called svirfneblin, and a lightDM session. I might switch that to just being a cli login and Xsession, which would be faster but I don't quite know how to do that yet. But you can also use configuration files in $HOME/.config/svirfneblin/ or /etc/xdg/svirfneblin/ to hold configuration files which we in fact do. It will fall back to awesomewm with the normal config directories if any part of that fails. The goal is to be Gnome3-like where it's nice but avoid all the dumb stuff about Gnome3 that bothered you and have the customizability of tiling. Also I can't imagine a civilized society that survives long if javascript is integrated into it's desktop environment.

Svirfneblin isn't a Gnome3 clone anymore. It's an AwesomeWM configuration which makes one or two things available that are inspired by Gnome3 and approximates a desktop environment to achieve the goals of this custom distro.

###vdev, dbus, and OpenRC partially ported from Gentoo and Devuan

	vdev	upstream		=	https://git.devuan.org/pkgs-utopia-substitution/vdev
			fireaxe-current	=	https://www.github.com/cmotc/vdev
			
	dbus	upstream		=	https://dbus.freedesktop.org/
			debian wheezy	=	https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/dbus
			fireaxe-current	=	https://www.github.com/cmotc/dbus(Unmodified so far, might just switch to devuan depending how things go)
			
	OpenRC	upstream		=	http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/openrc/
			debian sid		=	https://packages.debian.org/stretch/openrc
			fireaxe-current	=	https://www.github.com/cmotc/OpenRC(Unmodified so far.)

###proxychains-ng. Because Fuck Cloudflare.

	proxychains-ng	upstream		=	https://github.com/rofl0r/proxychains-ng
					fireaxe-current =	https://github.com/cmotc/proxychains-ng

###GRSecurity Hardened Linux kernel with x11 Modifications inspired by Mempo

	grsecurity hardened kernel	linux-image-4.4.4-grsec_4.4.4-grsec-1	=	https://github.com/cmotc/fireaxe-kernel-grsec-4.4
	grsecurity hardened libc	linux-libc-dev_4.4.4-grsec-1			=	https://github.com/cmotc/fireaxe-kernel-grsec-4.4

• Free Haven Bibliography

Besides the obvious, there are other security, activism, and systemd-free, and Free Software oriented GNU/Linux distributions. Sometimes, this is just an emergent property of them having decent documentation.

###Privacy Focused

• TAILS (Recommended)(Activist)(Live)
• Freepto (Activist)(Versatile)(Live)
• Ipredia (Recommended)(Activist)
• Mempo (Research)(Versatile)(Power-User)

###Resisting or likely to resist systemd and contributing replacements

• Devuan (Recommended)(Activist)(Research)(Versatile)
• GNewSense (Recommended)(Activist)(Stable)(Versatile)
• Gentoo Linux (Recomended)(Versatile)(Power-User)

###Security Focused

• OpenBSD (Recomended)(Versatile)(Power-User)
• Alpine Linux (Recomended)(Versatile)(Power-User)

###Network Observation Focused

• Kali Linux (Versatile)(Power-User)
• ParrotOS (Recomended)(Versatile)(Power-User)
• Pentoo Linux (Recomended)(Versatile)(Power-User)

###Has excellent documentation

• Arch Linux (Versatile)(Power-User)