Tails emulated VM with UTM

[colemickens]

Describe the issue

Tails is great, but it's also 🙁. I've constantly run into issues that occur at the intersection of their ISO/IMG build process and their blend of live-tools they use.

Anyway, I've probably tried 16+ different configurations to get Tails to boot in a UTM "emulated" virtual machine.

Since I got it working, I thought I'd go ahead and share it. There have been other users asking about.

Steps:

1. Download the Tails USB Stick image (ends in .img)
2. Use truncate to expand the USB image file, because they've "helpfully" added a feature that blocks boot if your USB is too small. I... want to say more but it was it is, I guess:

   truncate -s 10G tails.img 
   

3. Configure a UTM VM:
   • emulated
   • uefi enabled
   • graphics: (others might work): VGA
   • primary storage:
     • path: [path to the expanded img]
     • image type: disk image
     • interface: usb

Now, I only have an M2 Macbook Air to test on but I'm not even sure this result is really usable. I pretty much got it up, then gave up because of how slow it was.

[harryqt]

emulated

Why emulate? Can't we use Virtualize?

[zeroerrequattro]

Tails doesn't run on ARM chips, as far as I know it can't be virtualized on Apple Silicon Macs:
https://tails.net/doc/about/requirements/index.en.html