Vscode or Vscodium?#
Vscode is a powerful text editor, coming with hundreds of extensions, widely used and actively developed. The code is open-source, but the official package is generated by Microsoft, which adds arbitrary code and telemetry.
That’s why we’ll use Vscodium instead, which is built directly from the open-source code. The binaries are licensed under the MIT license and telemetry is disabled.
Overview#
We will first set up Tails to keep our installation persistent. Then we’ll see how to install Vscodium and create a persistent launcher.
Setup Persistence in Tails#
Tails is amnesic by design. To save our configuration across reboots, we need to set up a persistent storage and persistent dotfiles. Then restart Tails and activate the persistence
Download and install Vscodium#
- Visit the release page of Vscodium
- Download the package named
VSCodium-linux-x64-XXX.tar.gz(where XXX is the last version number - make sure to select the package ending with.tar.gz) - Once the download is finished, move the archive to the
Persistentfolder - Right-click on the file and select
Extract here - Rename the created folder in
vscodium
Add a launcher#
We’ll create two files: a bash script and a launcher:
Create a bash script#
Open a terminal and paste gedit ~/Persistent/vscodium-start.sh (Hint: to paste in the Terminal, use Ctrl+Shift+v). Hit enter.
Gedit is now open, paste the following two lines:
#!/bin/bash
/home/amnesia/Persistent/vscodium/codium --no-sandbox
Save and close
Back in the terminal, make the script executable: chmod u+x ~/Persistent/vscodium-start.sh
Create the launcher#
Create the persistent folder
mkdir -p /live/persistence/TailsData_unlocked/dotfiles/.local/share/applications
Create and edit the launcher with Gedit
gedit /live/persistence/TailsData_unlocked/dotfiles/.local/share/applications/code.desktop
and paste the following lines
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Exec=/home/amnesia/Persistent/vscodium-start.sh
Name=Code
Icon=/home/amnesia/Persistent/vscodium-icon.png
Last step, save the following icon in your Persistent folder:
You’re done, congratulations! You now have a fancy launcher in your Applications menu:
What’s left to improve?#
- Document the usage of Vscode extensions with Tails (working, will publish soon™)
- Investigate the consequences of using ‘no-sandbox’
- Add Vscode to the right-clic menu in Nautilus
- Automatically open some files (.txt, .md etc) with VSCode
You know how to do that? in the context of Tails?
→ Please take a minute and give me a hint!