Autorun in Windows

Originally created by Tails on #6083 (Redmine)

Ship what’s needed to run Tails inside Windows without installing anything.

It’s of limited usefulness:

• with administrator rights, one may simply install VirtualBox and run Tails in it
• without administrator credentials, a portable emulator won’t have kernel-side acceleration support, so the result with be almost unbearably slow

=> so patches welcome, but we won’t work on it ourselves.

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Resources

QEMU for Windows

It’s hard to find proper information about this online. QEMU’s website leads us to a broken link.

It seems the source code can be found here and pre-compiled binaries elsewhere. This is the place Incognito fetched its QEMU for Windows copy from.

The only piece of information I was able to find to reproduce such binaries from source is the patchset linked from the aforementioned page.

I could find no license information either.

autorun4linuxCD

The autorun4linuxCD offers a graphical tool to reboot on the inserted Live CD or to boot it inside qemu. The Debian package seems dedicated to Debian Live:

• homepage
• Debian package: autorun4linuxcd
• git clone git://git.debian.org/git/debian-live/autorun4linuxcd.git

It seems the package should be installed on the build system, and the content of /usr/lib/autorun4linuxcd/ copied at build time to the binary root of the built image.

Also, qemu for Windows should be installed in the binary image.

Incognito

Incognito installs qemu for Windows at build time (livecd-stage2.sh).

win32-loader

Supported by live-build in scripts/build/lb_binary_win32-loader, packaged in Debian.

Portable VirtualBox

Shipping a Portable VirtualBox could be a nice alternative to QEMU.

Linux Live USB Creator includes a Portable VirtualBox copy. This project is licensed under GPL v3, source code is available as well as a launcher. This one seems worth being tested.

There is also another version but I could find no license information nor source code. Moreover it seems it provides no support for a pre-configured launcher, but rather runs the VirtualBox configuration wizard.

Some scripts seems to suggest it’s GPL, and Linux Live USB Creator ships it. Somehow, even a setup wizard seems better than nothing to me. —bertagaz

Looks like this one needs administrator credentials.