What is Reddit's opinion of Portable Virtualbox?

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I'm now about to ditch Avast after getting false positives (such as MediaCoder triggering Behavior Shield, and Raymond.cc's Windows 7 OEM License Installer and Portable-Virtualbox triggering File Shield (I've even had to recompile the latter myself from source)), false negatives (such as some Bondat worm not being detected), CyberCapture delaying execution of programs (and also getting false positives), and various ads and offers that promotes upgrade to Premier. Any alternatives that offer similar (or close to that) protection?

You can run VB off of a flash drive with this distro of Portable-VirtualBox, although it does need some drivers installed to work, for which you may need admin. VB performance is pretty decent, but it depends on how much of your system resources you allocate to the VM.

I think you can run QEMU without admin rights, though. I haven't used that one so I really can't say how it runs, mind.

OR, you can enable the admin account using the sticky keys hack and grant your account admin rights. You can do that from the prompt that you get on the login screen after doing said hack, if you so choose- it's easier to just enable admin, though. I've done this before, it's not that hard. I should point out that I work in the tech industry and this was for job related reasons- it's great for when something borks up your password or you lose admin rights on your user account for some reason and cannot recover them, and are a potato and don't have a recent image to throw on the machine.

Doing the sticky keys thing will definitely get you in a hell of a lot of trouble if you get caught, though. And, if their admin has half a brain he/she will have disabled sticky keys.

Edit, other advice.

You can't just install VirtualBox on the external drive; it creates registry entries (on Windows at least) and is basically installed to that computer - virtual network cards and such. I've seen a few attempts to make a portable version, however have no experience with those. Here is an example. (I cannot vouch for it, again I've never used it before!)

Under normal circumstances VirtualBox has to be installed on each computer in order for what you want to work. There is a way to boot a direct OS in virtualbox off of USB but it is not recommended except when absolutely necessary. And even then you'd still need to install VirtualBox on the host first, create a new VM and have it boot off the USB drive.

My advice - use the live USB/SD card/SSD with linux installed.

Because the appliance stores several essential settings within VirtualBox, you'd need to run a portable version of VirtualBox of the usb, (http://portableapps.com/node/8191). Edit: Whoops! Right link: http://www.vbox.me/

However, you would only have to import once.

Secondly, every time you switch computers, you'd have to go into the settings for the appliance inside VirtualBox, and change the network adapters. (Just use the drop-down menu.)

Other than that, it sounds like it would work.

just have an emulator in it. You can get a portable virtualbox

another problem with hidden partitions is that you cannot write anything to the outer partition without risking data loss on the hidden partition. So if you have this set up for a while and aren't proactive in updating your partitions, you will have decoy files that all have timestamps from 2 years ago.

Not officially however there are a number of tools available to make any apps portable.

Or you could run it in a portable VM: http://www.vbox.me/

No not on 1 stick, you will need:

1. Usb-stick with Portable-VirtualBox http://www.vbox.me/
2. Other usb-stick with Tails

The big question however is WHY. You don't want an OS running as a shell around Tails, any compromise of that OS will compromise Tails. Also if that OS does not have the kernel modules of Virtualbox you will need to run the Portable-VirtualBox with Admin rights.

See the big warning signs on https://tails.boum.org/doc/advanced_topics/virtualization/index.en.html#security

You could consider http://www.vbox.me/, which allows you to use the live boot within a VM. If you create the live usb using Lily (http://www.linuxliveusb.com/) you can just select this as an option. It works fine overhere.

The VM could live on the external USB but you would need to install the VMware software on every PC...you would need admin privileges it install.

There is a portable version of Virtualbox (http://www.vbox.me) but you still need to install some parts on every machine.

no update yet. UEFI seems to be the problem. I am gathering that it is very difficult to bypass the UEFI 32 bit boot options, as there are none, and the device will always boot to windows 8.1 32bit. you can create a virtual machine on a flash drive and run it inside of windows 8.1.

to do it, download this. it will take you through the setup of installing the portable (unofficial!) version of vmware. you just create a new machine and point it to an iso (I have mine stored in the same drive as the portable vmware program)

if you have any trouble, just ask.

Ok.. been thinking about this too and have not tested this solution yet so YMMV.

Download and install portable virtualbox. Partition your USB stick into 3 partitions. Fat32 for Portable Apps + virtualbox. A ext? partition for Linux live distro (Debian Live my preference), and 3rd partition for a LUKS encrypted home partition.

You can use Unetbootin to create this live boot. This should leave you with a Syslinux bootable stick with a FAT32 partition you can put your portable tools on. I would make the live Linux build first making sure you can boot off it when you boot off USB. Pick a 32bit distro it is more portable. Create your encrypted partition, use mount --bind /dev/sd?-luks /home/user and copy any user files you need to it.

Set up virtualbox to use the partition of the Linux distro you just made and test it on a windows box see if it boots ok.

In theory that should make a pretty portable USB stick which is relatively secure. You can boot it directly on a machine if you don't need to use windows, else you can plug it into a windows box and run the portable virtualbox and access your files from the live Linux image.

I have the first part of this , a bootable live Linux (Debian Live) stick with an encrypted partition done as I use this already when I travel abroad. I take with me with my little Acer netbook with no storage/ OS on it and just boot off the stick as an when I need it. I have custom scripts in my encrypted home partition which do things like load wifi firmware, install custom packages and copy vpn keys etc. So I can boot into a Live distro, decrypt the partition --bind mount it over /home/user and then run all applications with persistent storage on the encrypted partition for next time I boot with it.

If you don't ever need to use windows then that will work for you.

Good luck.

I actually use Portable VirtualBox (http://www.vbox.me/) on an IronKey (Personal, not enterprise version) and a separate USB key. Windows only for VM, but functions just like desktop version of VirtualBox, supporting multiple virtual desktops, etc.