[[!meta date="2011-05-09 19:23:22 +0200"]]
[[!meta title="Bimonthly report: March and April 2011"]]
[[!tag announce]]

We are pleased to present you the second Tails bimonthly report.

This report may, or may not, be followed by others depending on the
feedback we get: if you like reading such news about Tails, don't
hesitate [[telling us|support/talk]]!

This report sums up the work that was done on Tails in March and
April 2011.

[[!toc levels=2]]

# New releases

The new Tails 0.7 major release was out on April 7th, quickly followed
by a bugfix and security release (0.7.1) on April 30th. See their
release announces for details:

  * [[Tails 0.7 announce|news/version_0.7]]
  * [[Tails 0.7.1 announce|news/version_0.7.1]]

# Google Summer of Code

We announced two months ago we [prepared three
projects](https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html#project-tails)
to be submitted under the Tor Project umbrella for the Google Summer
of Code. This was a great success for our first participation into the
GSoC program, as a total of five students sent applications for our
projects. In the end, two students were selected and will work this
summer on projects we have suggested:

* Max will implement [[tails-greeter|todo/TailsGreeter]], the
  graphical [[todo/boot_menu]] Tails really needs as more and more
  upcoming features (including [[todo/persistence]],
  [[todo/macchanger]], [[todo/bridge support]]) need to ask the user
  for input at boot time; reports of his work will be posted on a
  dedicated [[todo/TailsGreeter/blog]].
* Julien Voisin will implement a Meta-data anonymizing toolkit for
  file publication; thanks a lot to Mike Perry for accepting to be
  Julien's mentor, as we ourselves lack the needed time to mentor two
  students this year; Julien has setup a
  [blog](http://mat-tor.blogspot.com/) where one can keep track of his
  work.

We warmly welcome Max and Julien into the Tails and Tor development
communities!

Thanks to everyone who made this happen, including the students whose
GSoC application was rejected: you are welcome to join us anyway!

# Documentation

The Great Tails Documentation Rework Plan was started. Once this is
done, several entry points will be available to better fit a given
user's available time and energy. Such work happens in the
`doc-rework` branch of our [[Git|contribute/git]] repository. [[Want to
help?|contribute/how/documentation]]

A brand new [["how to contribute to Tails" documentation|contribute]]
was published. We hope it will make it easier for anyone interested to
get involved and make Tails better as there many ways *you* can
contribute to Tails: setting up a BitTorrent or HTTP mirror, helping
other Tails users, improving documentation, reporting bugs, fixing
bugs, implementing new features, improving Tails in your own language,
providing needed input to developers, etc.

# Outreach

## In the press

Shortly following their [announcement of Tails
0.7 release](https://lwn.net/Articles/439371/), LWN published a [great, long and
serious article about Tails](https://lwn.net/Articles/440279/) in last
week's edition.

Tails 0.7 release also [made
it](http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20110418#news)
[twice](http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=06629) on DistroWatch.

## Website

We published our new website layout. If you're into CSS, patches are
welcome to fix the latest glitches.

# A glimpse towards the future

## Upcoming releases

We've not decided yet what our plans exactly are. The alternative
seems to be: either we'll release 0.8 quickly with stuff that was
mostly ready, but not tested enough to make it into 0.7, or we'll
release 0.8 only when slightly more new major features are cooked and
ready to serve.

More 0.7.x point releases are to be expected anyway as security issues
are discovered in software we ship.

## Installing and upgrading Tails onto a USB stick

In the next months, a few of us are going to focus on preparing a tool
for easy install and upgrade of Tails onto USB sticks, with support
for an encrypted persistent volume in mind. We're likely to use
Fedora's [liveusb-creator](https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/)
as a basis. Either we'll make it more generic or we'll fork it
minimally, depending on how liveusb-creator's developers welcome the
idea of supporting our usecases.

## Other plans

Bridges support: we now have a working prototype that is likely to be
shipped into the upcoming 0.8 release. We'll make our patches to make
Vidalia support our usecase generic enough so that they can be merged
upstream.

PowerPC support (pre-Intel Macs): we're "almost" there, but we have a
hard time prioritizing this task among all exciting enhancements that
could be done on Tails. If you need Tails to support pre-Intel Macs,
don't hesitate [[telling us|support/talk]].
