A reporter (with a mac) was looking for assistance getting tails up and
running during 29c3, so I said "oh, I've done that" and sat down to try and
help.
After creating a usb of the tails iso using unetbootin, and rebooting, I
noticed refit wasn't recognizing the usb device.
A bit of digging later, and it turns out that this has been a bug with
refit for over a year now. Of course, the first instruction on the tails
documentation for osx is to install refit (these instructions are just
plain wrong, but if they are going to be left up, can someone at least
recommend making a backup before replacing the bootloader?).
With previous versions of osx, you could boot from any bootable usb just by
holding down the option key while starting up and then selecting the disk
to boot from. So I tried to use the bootable usb on my mac, which does not
have refit on it, and of course it did not recognize the usb drive.
A bit of digging later and I found out that apple has put in some sort of
restrictions to prevent booting a non-osx os from usb as of Mountain Lion
(and possibly with Lion as well, although I have not tried it).
Assuming that the ubuntu folks had found a workaround to this issue, I
tried the method in their documentation for creating a bootable usb that
will work, but it appears their instructions are old too.
There are a few leads for using something called refind instead of refit,
but ideally there should be a bootable usb device that doesn't require
modification of the host machine at all in order to work. And anyway, I am
in Berlin right now and don't have my backup drive or a copy of osx on me,
so I would have to wait to try out refind.
Someone on the cryptoparty irc group recommended that I try the advice on
this guide:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5unDeUo8w0
It gets me as far as a grub2 prompt and never boots into tails. I've tried
putting together a grub.cfg but none of the settings I've tried have
worked. I'm not a grub expert either.
Well anyway, this is obviously a bug.
I eventually set the reporter up with virtual box, a harddrive of size 0
bytes, that boots from the tails iso, and I told them this configuration
was not as safe as booting from usb.
-Jen
