Plucky users who need to work with virtual machines are advised to use VirtualBox. It’s FOSS, cross-platform, and, most importantly, compatible* with Plucky.

*On modern versions of Plucky, a block host rule (eg. block google.com) applies both in a web browser and inside desktop apps if feature:system is on. This means Spotify’s desktop app would be blocked from accessing google.com and the request would 404. The same logic follows for VirtualBox; trying to load google.com in a web browser running in a VM, even without Plucky installed in the VM, will load an unreachable site message.

The limitations of this are that rules outside of simple block host rules aren’t effective on VirtualBox–not from the host machine. But once inside the VM the user can install Plucky and configure it with all the same configurations as the host machine.

Therefore one may think of the setup as two layers of security:

  1. The simple block rules from the host machine block the worst sites (perhaps powered by a DNS filtering service)

  2. Installing Plucky in the VM allows finer control over the nuanced sites that need special blocking rules

While the second layer can be discarded by creating a new VM, the first layer cannot. Is it watertight? Maybe not, but it offers a vastly improved experience to those who must work with virtualization.

How to set it up

  1. Download VirtualBox for your platform from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads. (Arch Linux users can install it from the offical extra repo: sudo pacman -S virtualbox)

  2. Follow normal installation procedure and accept default settings whenever prompted by the setup assistant.

  3. Obtain a .iso file for the OS you’ll be working with and create a VM to use it with.

  4. After launching into the virtual machine, you can test that the first layer of security is working by launching a web browser and trying to visit a known blocked site. If Plucky is managing virtualboxvm, the page will fail to load.

  5. Download Plucky from https://getplucky.net/ and install Plucky on the virtual machine.

  6. Perform final configuration steps such as getting logged into https://u.pluckeye.net/ and syncing your config with the config used by the host machine.

Last updated: 2024-09-27