Hello,
I've recently discovered your wonderful project and decided to explore
as much as I could with my MacBook Pro (Early 2015). Of course, I soon
found out that many users have had difficulty implementing Tails alongside
their macOS systems. After doing some research and several trials, I've
found a way to operate the OS without the use of additional boot managers
-- such as rEFInd -- and I hope your development team can use this
information to ease the experience for us Mac users.
First things first: almost all of the forum pages that provide a
workaround for using Tails next to OSX suggest also using rEFInd. I wasn't
fond of the overhead that installing new software to boot Tails would
create, so I searched for user cases where the extra boot manager was
avoided. I came across this
<
https://redmine.tails.boum.org/code/issues/6242> entry on the Tails forum
which redirected me to this project <
https://github.com/hellais/TAILS-OSX> on
GitHub. After installing Vagrant, initializing a vagrant environment with
"vagrant up", and several failed trials at running their imaging script, it
was clear that their code was outdated: it no longer fetches for the most
recent Tails distribution, requiring the user to download it independently.
After placing both ver. 3.10.1 and the PGP signature into their "data"
directory, the aforementioned script successfully recognizes the files and
images the Tails ISO onto the chosen volume. Before attempting to boot from
this drive, I had also attempted to install Tails using the instructions
provided by your main website. I imaged the drive multiple times, using a
different file system each attempt. Neither FAT32, macOS Extended, nor APFS
were recognized as bootable volumes by the MacBook Pro's bootloader. After
creating a custom EFI bootloader via the GitHub project, the machine
finally recognized the drive. Tails booted successfully. Tor, however,
failed to setup even after connecting to a network. The intermediate
instance also failed to install Tails to a more "permanent" drive,
displaying an error having to do with the master boot record directory -- I
couldn't attach a photo of the issue, as the boum.org domain rejected the
larger email size. I then transferred the 3.10.1 ISO from my main Mac
volume to a flash drive that I then opened in Tails. I used the Tails
installer and this ISO to image the operating system onto that flash drive
instead of cloning the intermediary. The installation completed
successfully this time around, and this second USB drive successfully
imaged Tails via cloning onto another two drives, both of which are
recognized and boot successfully from the Mac EFI.
Some additional notes, for what they're worth: the Tails boot menu
differed between the instance that couldn't successfully clone itself and
the one that could. The former was similar to the example provided on the
Tails website, while the other was an entirely gray screen with the boot
options very offset from center. I've taken photos of both if necessary.
Additionally, the instructions at the bottom of the unsuccessful Tails
drive's boot screen which read, "Use the (up) and (down) keys to select a
boot option," or something to that effect, were buggy. What I presume were
supposed to be up and down arrows where the parentheses are in the text
above were missing, and pressing the up and down arrows made the text
disappear entirely.
I'd be happy to provide more info about my setup and provide more
detailed steps or the photos I took if needed. Again, thanks for all the
great work you guys do! Hope this was helpful.
