Hey there!
On 20/10/25 15:51, billylaw1221--- via Tails-dev wrote:
> I would love to know more about building the tails img. I have used the prebuilt img with success but lately it’s been getting stuck on the black screen before the greeter. I’m running on a M1 Pro I have nixos on asahi. Would just like more info about building from source or from git labs.
> Thanks again.
Since Tails is still working fine for me on my M1 Pro, my guess is the
nixos DTBs became out of sync with Tails'. What Tails/Asahi image are
you using? What kernel version do you have in nixos? Are you aware there
are 7.x Tails/Asahi images now? They are not in the MEGA folder anymore,
you will find them at [1]. Make sure you read README.txt in the same
folder. Many things have changed since 6.x, but I'm extremely busy at
the moment so I haven't found the time to do a proper write-up yet.
If you're interested in building Tails for Apple Silicon, the repository
is at [2]. The correct branch is wip/asahi for development versions, or
you can use the 7.x-asahi tags for releases. 6.x builds are not
supported anymore (to save space I had to put offline the debian
repository hosting the 6.x kernel and mesa drivers; 7.x otoh uses the
Bananas repository, see [3]).
Unfortunately, since Tails does not provide arm64 deb repository
snapshots, you need to hack your DNS resolution in such a way that it
points back to Debian's servers and not Tails'. To do this, I suggest to:
1. install systemd-resolved and a webserver such as nginx
2. add the following entry to /etc/hosts:
```
127.0.0.1 time-based.snapshots.deb.tails.boum.org
tagged.snapshots.deb.tails.boum.org
```
3. configure nginx as in [4]
This is a dirty hack which could be removed if the Tails project started
providing arm64 deb repository snapshots.
Other than this, see [5], which is Tails' official guide for building
images. I suggest you try that and if you fail to build the image with
the information I provided about (which is quite likely since I admit
the information above is not very detailed) report back.
Cheers!
[1]
https://tails.noisycoil.dev/images/
[2]
https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/noisycoil/tails
[3]
https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1#Bananas_Archive
[4]
https://lists.autistici.org/message/20240403.002431.f9a26ef2.en.html
[5]
https://tails.net/contribute/build/
