Prestium OS Setup

[tanky0u]

Prestium OS is a Tails OS-like live linux distro. Unlike Tails, Prestium routes its internet connections through I2P network. This makes Prestium a nice choice for visiting I2P websites, forums, torrent trackers and more. In this guide, I will show you the steps to get a Prestium OS Standalone VM qube going.

1. Download Prestium OS ISO file from https://prestium.org. For QubesOS use, we will need the EE edition of the ISO, namely, Prestium-1.6.0-EE-amd64.iso at the current time of writing. Download this file to one of your qubes. Take a note of the qube you have downloaded this ISO file, we will use that qube to boot the Prestium ISO.

2. Create a new qube. Open Qube Manager. Click on “Create a new qube” icon on the upper right hand side. Name it “Prestium”, pick color purple, pick “Type: StandaloneVM (fully persistent)”, pick “Template: (none)”, leave its networking as the default, and tick “Launch settings after creation”. Then Click OK.

3. Prestium qube settings. Here are some screenshots for various settings:
   

   
   
   
   

4. Boot the Prestium OS ISO. On the Advanced Settings tab for Prestium qube, select “Boot from CD-ROM”. Select “from file in qube” and the qube’s name from step 1, click on triple dots and navigate to the file directory of the Prestium OS ISO file. Then click OK.
   
   

5. QubesOS will create a new virtual machine and boot up the ISO file. After a minute or so, you will be presented with the PrestiumOS desktop. First, adjust your PrestiumOS screen resolution to your liking. Right click on the desktop:
   
   

6. Setup networking for Prestium. Right click on the desktop and pull up a terminal, and repeat the commands on the screenshots. Adjust your IP ADDRESS (in red) and GATEWAY (in green) values according to the values given in your Prestium VM. These values are shown in step 3, or you can check them again by Click Qube Tray Icon > Prestium > Settings
   

Change to the root account:
$ su -
type-in toor for the password:

$ ip a

$ ip address add <IP-ADDRESS-HERE>/8 dev enX0
$ ip route add default via <GATEWAY-ADDRESS-HERE> dev enX0

7. Restart i2pd service.
   
   

Press q to quit out of the systemctl output. Lastly, type exit to close the terminal.

With step 7, the setup concludes, you should be able to right click on the desktop, select “Web Browser” and start browsing the I2P sites.

Keep in mind that Prestium is a Live-distro, meaning, all your changes, new file creations, etc. will be deleted once your shut down Prestium OS. It is, in this sense, amnesic.

Helpful? Tips xmr:

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[tanky0u]

My review of using PrestiumOS on QubesOS:

1. No global clipboard support is available. As this setup is a standalone VM, prestium cannot reach your global clipboard. That means, you will have trouble copying from and pasting into the presitum os VM some text snippets. However, one solution you can use is creating QR-codes for the texts you want to copy out of the PrestiumOS VM. You can use qrencode tool on the terminal for that.

2. You have to setup Prestium VM’s networking manually everytime you start it.

Apart from these, I like Prestium running inside QubesOS. It gives me an ephemeral (disposable-like) way of accessing I2P network. What would be better than that, is, having Prestium setup inside Qubes in a similar fashion to Whonix. We should have a sys-i2p that a persistent Prestium OS AppVM uses to reach network, setup its own networking settings, and also have access to global clipboard and qvm-copy support between other qubes. That would make using I2P inside QubesOS much more frictionless.