Skip to content

GitLab

  • Projects
  • Groups
  • Snippets
  • Help
    • Loading...
  • Help
    • Help
    • Support
    • Community forum
    • Submit feedback
    • Contribute to GitLab
  • Sign in / Register
T
tails
  • Project overview
    • Project overview
    • Details
    • Activity
    • Releases
  • Repository
    • Repository
    • Files
    • Commits
    • Branches
    • Tags
    • Contributors
    • Graph
    • Compare
  • Issues 944
    • Issues 944
    • List
    • Boards
    • Labels
    • Service Desk
    • Milestones
  • Merge Requests 13
    • Merge Requests 13
  • CI / CD
    • CI / CD
    • Pipelines
    • Jobs
    • Schedules
  • Operations
    • Operations
    • Incidents
    • Environments
  • Analytics
    • Analytics
    • CI / CD
    • Repository
    • Value Stream
  • Members
    • Members
  • Collapse sidebar
  • Activity
  • Graph
  • Create a new issue
  • Jobs
  • Commits
  • Issue Boards
  • tails
  • tails
  • Issues
  • #18054

Closed
Open
Opened Dec 09, 2020 by sajolida@sajolidaMaintainer0 of 1 task completed0/1 task

Distribute USB images by default for all virtual machines

It's possible to start VirtualBox from both:

  • A physical USB stick, after doing some not-too-complicated magic on the command line:

    https://www.how2shout.com/how-to/virtualbox-virtual-machine-boot-usb.html#Step_3_Create_VDMK_Raw_file_of_connected_bootable_USB_drive

    Users can use the Persistent Storage on the physical USB stick out of the box.

  • A USB image, after converting it to VDI on the command line and increasing its size:

    $ VBoxManage convertdd eos-eos3.0-amd64-amd64.161024-144409.base.img eos.vdi

    https://www.pragmaticlinux.com/2020/09/how-to-increase-the-disk-size-in-a-virtualbox-virtual-machine/

    When creating a Persistent Storage, I got:

    Error: Tails is running from non-USB / non-SDIO device.

    Probably something that could be fixed.

In both cases, users also have to remove live-media=removable. (#6397)

  • Double-check whether we could workaround the need to remove live-media=removable.

Once we get there we could advertize USB image only for virtual machines as virt-manager works fine with USB images as well. I didn't test GNOME Disks.

Stats from WhisperBack reports in 2019 and 2020:

ISO VFAT
VirtualBox 24 50% 1 2%
QEMU 12 25% 11 23%
48
  • For QEMU where USB images are already available, half of users choose them despite not being the default download.
  • Some people already running VirtualBox from a physical or virtual USB stick.
Edited Dec 15, 2020 by sajolida
To upload designs, you'll need to enable LFS and have admin enable hashed storage. More information
Assignee
Assign to
None
Milestone
None
Assign milestone
Time tracking
None
Due date
None
Reference: tails/tails#18054