Tinfoil Hat Linux is a Linux distribution designed for Paranoia security. It is the sort of distribution one would install on a computer that is kept in a locked room, not connected to any network, and use only for cryptographically signing cryptographic key. As such, the distribution fits on a single ordinary Floppy#The_3.BD-inch_micro_floppy_diskette, so the small footprint provides additional benefits. It requires a 386DX computer or better, with at least 8 MB of computer memory. The computer need not even have a hard drive.

Tinfoil Hat takes sophisticated measures to defeat hardware and software surveillance, including keystroke logging, video camera, and TEMPEST. Even shoulder surfing is very hard when Tinfoil Hat is switched to paranoid mode, as a result of the paranoid screen contrast settings which are very low contrast.

Apart from being suitable for extreme security Tinfoil Hat Linux could also be used by people who want to get an impression of what it is like to work in a text-only environment (not a graphical user interface) in Linux. It is fairly suitable for people wanting to learn Linux the most challenging and hard way. That means starting straight off with a Bourne shell and the editor Vi.

An advantage is that it can be used on virtually any computer. A novice could show off his Linux knowledge to her/his friends, surprise them with the paranoid security features, and might let them have a laugh. The fun lies partly in the fact that the very serious text of the documentation is salted with just a few jokes, which reinforces their humor by the stark contrast with the surrounding text. And the paranoid features are so over the top that those might be found funny as well. Another advantage is that it is fairly easy to create the Tinfoil Hat booting floppy with Microsoft Windows. That is, if you don t care about checking the checksum.

But for learning Linux this distro also has serious disadvantages. It uses BusyBox instead of the normal util-linux, the GNU Coreutils (formerly known as fileutils, shellutils and textutils) and other common Unix tools. This means that a novice has to get used to Linux and at the same time to a distro that is different from mainstream distros like SuSE Linux and Debian GNU/Linux. Another problem is the arcane editor Vi. While the distro also offers the nano (text editor) text editor, this editor is so different from Notepad that may not be easily usable to a novice coming from Microsoft Windows.

The logo of Tinfoil Hat is Tux, the Linux penguin, wearing a tinfoil hat.

= See also =

*List of Linux distributions *Comparison of Linux distributions

= External links =