Re: [Tails-ux] RFC: Phrasing for warning users when running …

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Author: sajolida
Date:  
To: Tails user experience & user interface design
Subject: Re: [Tails-ux] RFC: Phrasing for warning users when running in a non-free VM
Juan Miguel Navarro Martínez:
> On 2015-08-08 at 15:32, sajolida wrote:
>> I guess that this message is targeted mainly at people running Windows
>> and Mac (people on Linux probably already have free software) so is
>> VirtualBox the only option free software option here? At least it's the
>> only one we document on the website that runs outside of Linux (I
>> think): https://tails.boum.org/doc/advanced_topics/virtualization.
>
> As far as Wikipedia Comparison of platform virtualization software[1] is
> updated, VirtualBox, QEMU and Bochs are the only free(*) Type-2
> Hypervisors for Windows. I hope I didn't miss any other.
>
> For VirtualBox, (*)if you want extra functionality you will need the
> propietary extension pack. As of 5.0, it supports both Hyper-V and KVM
> paravirtualization interfaces which are assigned by default to Windows
> and GNU/Linux guest OS respectively.
> For QEMU, the releases shown on the download page are 2.2.1, 2.3.0 and
> 2.4.0-rc4[2] at the moment of this writting. Solutions for Windows are,
> either to compile it with MinGW[3] or Cygwin[4], which most Windows
> users are not used to, or the unofficial pre-compiled binaries[5][6][7].
> As for Bochs[8], I never heard of it so I'm not sure how good it is.


Hi, thanks for investigating all this!

Unfortunately, I think the conclusion is that we are stuck with
VirtualBox only. QEMU for Windows is not an official package (and I
wonder whether it has a graphical interface) and Bochs is too obscure.

If this landscape happen to change in the future, then we should
document then in the main documentation as we are not considering not
listing VirtualBox in the warning but only pointing to the doc.