I don’t believe anymore, that a comprehensive design documentation would make things simpler. Learning isn’t writing big books and having someone read and magically remember it all. It’s a discourse. Unfortunately, the discourse way seems the only one.
[ Otherwise, someone like me should be able to understand Tails by reading their design documentation, right? Even though the Tails one is much more comprehensive, and they have a policy to update it on changes, it misses so many pieces, that I sometimes cannot make head or tail of Tails myself. - For example, I spend at least an hour trying to figure out why vimeo works in Tails but not in TBB and not in Whonix - Diff between Tor browser inside whonix and tails and windows - #10 by Patrick - to no avail. ]
Understanding Whonix. Task nr. 1.
Go to: Whonix · GitHub. Have a look at each package and their short description one by one. Example…
- whonixcheck - Anonymity and security check - systemcheck - Security Check Application — Essential for now? No. Perhaps later.
- rads - Same.
- anon-shared-helper-scripts - probably not for now. (You will notice if you miss this package as part of a dependency.)
- anon-gw-anonymizer-config - Tor Configuration and Tweaks for Anonymity Distributions — Definitively need this.
Just skim through it.
(Since the package list on the web can change… Once you have whole Whonix code… Get a list of all Whonix packages.
cd packages
ls
Base your notes upon those.)
If some package is unclear, click on it. Read a bit more. Read the long package description perhaps in debian/control.