[Tails-dev] Idea: document creating Tails USB thumb drive vi…

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Author: Lukasz Dobrogowski
Date:  
To: Tails-dev public mailing list
Subject: [Tails-dev] Idea: document creating Tails USB thumb drive via VirtualBox
Hello,

Today on #tails we had an interesting revelation; i.e. creating Tails
USB stick is quite often done via a VM with USB passthrough, such as
VirtualBox. So it could be nice to document this method on
https://tails.boum.org/doc/first_steps/usb_installation/

There was a concern from intrigeri:

[23:23:03] <intrigeri> This would be great IMHO, but one problem is that
there's no free software virtual machine with USB passthrough support
that we can easily document there. AFACT only qemu/kvm/libvirt support
this, and even with virt-manager, it's non-trivial to setup.

However, this seems not true. If I understand
https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch03.html#idp11494896 correctly, USB
1.0/1.1 (OHCI/UHCI) passthrough is implemented as free software and only
USB 2.0 (EHCI) support is part of the proprietary Oracle extension pack.
USB 1.1 is IMHO good enough for installing Tails on a pendrive, so...
who's up to writing a tutorial on this? ;-)

Cheers,
Łukasz Dobrogowski