Anonymous Internet surfing with Liberté Linux

Liberté Linux is a small (220MB) Gentoo based secure oriented distribution available as a live CD, live USB thumbdrive, installable or Open Virtualization Bundle (.ova) compatible with Virtualbox and VMWare. This operating system enables people to anonymously communicate with others via chat (Pidgin+OTR, XChat) or email and browse the Internet using tor, it supports new and old hardware, including 3G modems, Bluetooth and experimental UEFI booting.

Openbox is the default window manager, from there you can configure your mouse, keybindings, timezone, etc. You will find security software like the open source Figaro password manager and GNU Privacy Assistant (GPA) to manage encryption keys together with tools to read text (ePDFViewer, FBReader), listen to audio (Audacious), watch videos (Movie Player), edit images(Geeqie) and a task manager displaying CPU and RAM. Liberté Linux keep its size small replacing bloated software with lightweight tools that do not carry unnecessary features, for example instead of using LibreOffice to edit text it comes with Abiword.

Liberté Linux Anonymous operating system

The wireless network card MAC address is randomly changed at boot time, the only thing Liberté Linux asks the user to enter is a passphrase during installation in order to create a LUKS compatible encrypted storage space using otfe  (On-the-fly encryption) where persistent user data will be stored in /mnt/boot/otfe/liberte.vol  using a paranoid 8192 RSA key that will take a couple of minutes to generate. The user is automatically logged in as “anon“, if you need to be root, and it is never a good idea to browse the Internet as root, the root password is “liberte“, entering “gentoo=root” during boot will also unlock it.

Epiphany is the default browser, leaner than Firefox, it comes with HTML5 support, you shouldn’t need flash to view online videos in YouTube, the browser has been configured to surf the Internet through tor,  including links to The Hidden Wiki, Wikileaks and Torcheck on the main page to get you started. The Florence virtual keyboard allows the user to enter text using the mouse, a good way to bypass hardware keyloggers in public computers, RAM memory is wiped when you power off the system to stop cold boot attacks.

Liberté Linux is pioneering the use of Cable Communications for anonymous email exchange, achieved giving the user a cryptic .onion and .i2p address that functions as  personal email address, it requires some configuration in Claws email to use it. Message delivery can take hours or days and you will get a delivery receipt once the message reaches the recipient.

Liberté Linux Florence virtual keyboard

It is possible to run a stand alone VPN or PPTP using the network manager and tor-resolve in console mode, you can run Liberté Linux inside Windows too but I would not advice it as IMHO it weakens your privacy. I have used other Linux distributions for anonymous Internet surfing, like Tails and OccupyOS and I have decided to adopt Liberté Linux as my default distro for secure communications, I find it more suitable for me because it is more lightweight, it comes with detailed documentation, it creates an encrypted storage space for user data and exists the option to disable tor in case I need to login into Paypal or any similar site blocking proxies.

I don’t think you will be disappointed with this operating system. If you are wondering why it does not include Truecrypt I suspect that it might have to do with the fact that Truecrypt is not released under the standard Linux GPL license and this can be a problem. However, you can create your own encrypted containers from command line with otfe.

Visit  Liberté Linux homepage