An Interesting Question...
So a freind of mine recently came to me with an interesting question. He was concerned about his browsing security and wanted to know if he could live boot a distribution of Qubes OS from a USB drive, and from within that same USB also run a virtual machine of Tails OS. Qubes is an interesting distribution that divides workspaces into virtual machines, a concept called "isolation." The idea is that if anything were to be compromised within one workspace, it wouldn't permeate to the rest of the machine. Tails on the other hand is meant for secure web browsing. He wanted to harness the pros of both and cram it all into a bootable USB.
Can he have his cake and eat it, too?
I did not have an answer for him, but I was determined to find one so I went ahead and fished an unused 16gb SanDisk Cruzer flash drive out of my drawer. I then went into the Windows Disk Management tool and partitioned the drive into two parts - 2048mb for Tails and the remainder for Qubes. I kept them both in FAT32.
The idea was to fully install Qubes on the USB, and have the Tails ISO readily available from another partition so as to keep the processes insulated from the machine it would be booting on. I used MultiBootUSB to do this. Make sure to enable the full 4gb of persistence so you have headroom to download any additional VM software and Tails.
*Some notes: both the ISO and disk image are available for Tails. Since from the beginning I intended to run it from a VM, the ISO image is necessary.
DO NOT INSTALL TAILS WITH MULTIBOOTUSB. We are merely holding the ISO in the smaller partition so it can be mounted from within Qubes and used to flash the VM.You may have noticed... ~2gb for Tails, ~4.8gb for Qubes and ~4gb for persistence adds up to ~10.8gb used out of ~14.62gb available as seen in the photo above. there is 3.82gb missing... will this be available in the 12gb partition? Maybe... maybe not. If this is the case it might be a good step to wither make the 2gb Tails ISO partition larger, moving it up to about 5-6gb, or (recommended) making a third partition.*
To be continued...