so, i have a few issues/ideas here.
first, is there any chance we can get the kvm images on the whonix.org server? for documentation purposes, using gitlab requires a lot more steps and is a bit of a pain in the ass. ideally, when kicksecure is ready for deployment, it would be great if the kvm images were either included with the distro or installable via apt-get.
as for some of the other issues that i considered not newb friendly involving kvm, i’'ve been able to offer some scripts around the issue that can be run on the host. if i get them to something user friendly enough, would it be worth including with the whonix kvm tarballs? i’ve found a fairly simple way to script shrinking the qcow2 sizes after updates. also, while it’s still rough at the moment, i think i may be able to offer a user friendly script to snapshot the workstation in a way that still allows for a writethrough persistent disk. just exploring how to make it bash complete friendly with the tab key. currently playing with creating filenames based on date/time.
some other observations i’ve had are as follows.
1, with whonix in read-only disk mode and using live boot, it may be worth adding a script function that is autocalled to make “live mode” the default boot option after the first boot and, hopefully, update and dist-upgrade.
2, include an update script that will boot the whonix individual whonix images in read/write mode for update purposes, which will then reset the images to read-only mode after shutdown. steps could be added to use zerofill and other steps to shrink the disk sizes in between. i am playing with this at the moment.