Mofo Linux tears down virtual walls
Crossing Frontiers

Mofo Linux enables secure digital communications, even in places where it is politically or ideologically unwelcome.
Mofo Linux claims to help facilitate global freedom of information. It comes with the tools needed to work around politically motivated firewalls in countries such as China, Iran, Turkey, Thailand, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and other countries with repressive regimes. The toolset includes various VPN flavors and other tools such as I2P, Cjdns, and Lantern along with Tor, Tor Browser, and Tor Messenger. The system also offers Arab and Chinese localization in addition to English.
Mofo Linux [1] was forked from Porteus, the portable distribution based on Slax and thus ultimately on Slackware, in 2011. Meanwhile, the system has matured to a fully fledged distribution and changed its underpinnings to Ubuntu 15.10. The live image with installer is available for downloading from SourceForge [2] and weighs in at about 1.6GB. You can burn the image onto an optical disk or transfer it to a USB stick using Universal Netboot Installer (Unetbootin) and the dd console tool. Alternatively, you can try it out in live mode with virtual machines like VirtualBox. The project took over the installer virtually unchanged from Ubuntu. It offers to set up Logical Volume Manager (LVM) as well as to encrypt the entire system or just the home directory.
Tor or I2P
Mofo Linux uses the well-known Unity 7 Desktop interface (Figure 1); however, there are some fairly obscure icons on the left side of the screen. This is where the project locates applications that serve the specific purpose of the distribution. At the top, below the mandatory search box, is the Tor Browser [3]. It directs outgoing requests by the browser across multiple servers of the Tor anonymization network to conceal the identity of the user.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Akamai Will Host kernel.org
The organization dedicated to cloud-based solutions has agreed to host kernel.org to deliver long-term stability for the development team.
-
Linux Kernel 6.14 Released
The latest Linux kernel has arrived with extra Rust support and more.
-
EndeavorOS Mercury Neo Available
A new release from the EndeavorOS team ships with Plasma 6.3 and other goodies.
-
Fedora 42 Beta Has Arrived
The Fedora Project has announced the availability of the first beta release for version 42 of the open-source distribution.
-
Dash to Panel Maintainer Quits
Charles Gagnon has stepped away as maintainer of the popular Dash to Panel Gnome extension.
-
CIQ Releases Security-Hardened Version of Rocky Linux
If you're looking for an enterprise-grade Linux distribution that is hardened for business use, there's a new version of Rocky Linux that's sure to make you and your company happy.
-
Gnome’s Dash to Panel Extension Gets a Massive Update
If you're a fan of the Gnome Dash to Panel extension, you'll be thrilled to hear that a new version has been released with a dock mode.
-
Blender App Makes it to the Big Screen
The animated film "Flow" won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the 97th Academy Awards held on March 2, 2025 and Blender was a part of it.
-
Linux Mint Retools the Cinnamon App Launcher
The developers of Linux Mint are working on an improved Cinnamon App Launcher with a better, more accessible UI.
-
New Linux Tool for Security Issues
Seal Security is launching a new solution to automate fixing Linux vulnerabilities.