I2P
If you are using Debian or Ubuntu, or probably any other up-to-date apt-based Linux distribution, there’s another option which may you may prefer. In order to do this, one must add the Whonix apt package repository to your package sources, and install their tb-starter package from their stretch-testing repository. Don’t worry, I’ll take you through it step-by-step.
This guide is intended for users who are aware of the implications of using third-party repositories on their Debian-based Linux PC’s. In particular, Whonix is designed to pro-actively prevent certain kinds of attacks from affecting the user, and their packages sometimes overwrite things like hosts files and such with versions suitable for the Whonix threat model. While I currently use the following packages successfully on both Debian and Ubuntu Linux at this time, I cannot guarantee that they will work for everyone’s specific configuration.
First, you’ll need to obtain and install the Whonix package signing keys. This will allow you to be sure that you are obtaining the correct package from the repository automatically.
sudo apt-key --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/whonix.gpg adv --keyserver hkp://ipv4.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-keys 916B8D99C38EAF5E8ADC7A2A8D66066A2EEACCDA
Next, you need to tell apt, the package manager, where to look for the packages in question. The i2p browser is still in stretch-testers, so that is the version we will be using. ‘main’ means that the profile is Free Software per the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
echo 'deb http://deb.whonix.org stretch-testers main' | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/whonix-testing.list # apt-transport-* season to taste
Now, you must tell apt to update it’s list of available packages so it becomes aware of the Tor Browser packages.
sudo apt-get update
Finally, install tb-starter and tb-updater.
sudo apt-get install tb-starter tb-updater
The last step is to run update-i2pbrowser. This will pre-configure the i2p browser on your system.
update-i2pbrowser
If for some reason, update-i2pbrowser doesn’t work(Usually this is in the absence of Tor on the system) you may run
update-i2pbrowser --devbuildpassthrough
instead.
Finally, you need to add the following lines to the bottom of /etc/i2pbrowser.d/31_i2p_default.conf.
# /etc/i2pbrowser.d/31_i2p_default.conf
TOR_HIDE_UPDATE_CHECK_UI=1
TOR_NO_DISPLAY_NETWORK_SETTINGS=1
TOR_HIDE_BROWSER_LOGO=1
TOR_SKIP_LAUNCH=1
TOR_SKIP_CONTROLPORTTEST=1
Or, you can just run these commands, now that you know what they do:
#! /bin/sh
sudo apt-key --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/whonix.gpg adv --keyserver hkp://ipv4.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-keys 916B8D99C38EAF5E8ADC7A2A8D66066A2EEACCDA
echo 'deb http://deb.whonix.org stretch-testers main' | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/whonix-testing.list # apt-transport-* season to taste
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tb-starter tb-updater
update-i2pbrowser
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