Hello,
I’m a new user to Whonix and used Tails before (in a VM). Since it seems that getting files from the VM to the host is a difficult topic ( File Transfer - Whonix ) I want to present you an easy way how I did it on Tails and how it works on Whonix.
As for security reasons I didn’t want to have virtualbox guest additions installed (I uninstalled them with sudo apt-get purge virtualbox-guest-* ).
Basically we use a new hard disk that we mount in whonix, whose container we can also mount on the guest OS.
Problems with this solution: You (might) have to shutdown the Whonix Workstation to read the container.
Creating the Container
-
Shutdown the Workstation, go in the settings of it and add a new hard disk to the first (SAS) controller (if you add it to the second, it will not boot). Choose a fixed size vmdk Container.
-
Start the workstation and do the following:
To create a FAT device, we have to install the fat drivers:
sudo apt-get install dosfstools
To have a partition and mount manager (this is superior to the KDE one since we can one-click mount volumes):
sudo apt-get install gnome-disk-utility
Start “disks” via GUI (if you start it via console it will not work):
Applications - Utility - Disks
-
Select device and format it with FAT32 (cogwheel symbol). You could use NTFS I guess (that would allow files >4GB), but I never needed that and never tested it.
-
Mount it with the “play” button.
Mounting the virtual disk on the host OS
On Windows you can use ImDisk ( Tools and utilities for Windows ):
Shutdown the Workstation and then you can right-click the vmdk main file and select “Mount as ImDisk Virtual Disk”.
If the VM is still running it will give an error. There is a way to still mount them by using VMWare Workstation and mount it via “File - Map Virtual Disks” (As far as I know the free VMWare Player does not offer this feature). There are also other ways to mount vmdk files but I didn’t test them if they work if the workstation VM is still running.
On Linux, google for “linux mount vmdk” - there are lots of ways.
Feel free to add this to your wiki.
greetings and thank you for creating Whonix!