I updated my Whonix Gateway (VirtualBox) today and upon rebooting, Live mode was no longer an option to choose from.
I took a look at the /etc/grub.d/10_20_linux_live to see if I could spot anything that might’ve broken, but I didn’t notice anything wrong.
I decided to start fresh by importing the .ova file for the newest version (17.4.4.6, stable). However, upon booting and performing an update in system maintenance mode, trying to reboot and choose the Live User Session mode seems to open System Maintenance mode with persistence each time.
I’ve already deleted my old appliance for this fresh copy of the gateway and workstation. I’m not sure how to proceed. I’m not a developer or power user, but if there is any way I can help to figure out what’s happened, please advise.
Best regards,
Jake
EDIT: Have tried a reinstall of grub-live (‘sudo apt install --reinstall --no-install-recommends grub-live’) but no improvement, it still boots into Sysmaint with persistence when choosing Live User Session.
EDIT 2: **Adding here for others reference, it was actually booting into Live mode as arraybolt3 explains in their response, I just got confused by the system maintenance panel showing on boot and had expected to see the word Live in the top right. **
Okay, so I have also tried just importing fresh appliance again (stable 17.4.4.6 .ova) and trying to run Live User Session mode without running any updates and it still goes directly into System Maintenance mode with the gateway virtual machine. So it seems like there is something wrong before any updates or modifications are made to the VMs.
Could you share a screenshot of the Whonix-Gateway virtual machine in this state? We recently added a feature to Whonix-Gateway where the system maintenance panel will appear upon login in user sessions if user-sysmaint-split isn’t installed on the gateway. By default, user-sysmaint-split is not installed on the gateway, so you should see the system maintenance panel on the gateway even when booting into “LIVE Mode | USER Session”. (This does look awfully similar to “PERSISTENT Mode | SYSMAINT Session”, but it’s not the same thing.)
Thank you for your response, perhaps I have gotten confused by seeing that as the Workstation doesn’t appear to have the same behaviour. Regardless, here is a screenshot of the Gateway after booting from the option “LIVE Mode | USER Session”
There is no LIVE indicator in the top-right as I was accustomed to seeing, is there another indicator for which mode it has booted in other than in the top right?
Ah, my bad, so I was confused! Clicking the green indicator in the top right shows that is in Live mode and not persistent.
I’m so sorry to have wasted your time with this, I didn’t read into the update much at all and was going off past indicators. Thank you again for explaining the changes!
No problem, it is a significant departure from the old behavior and I can definitely see how it can be confusing. (We changed how the live indicator worked too since the old one was Xfce-specific and we wanted a desktop-agnostic indicator instead, so that’s why the indicator moved.) Glad I was able to help!
