On Wednesday, November 1, 2017 at 12:54:23 PM UTC, Desobediente wrote: > Could the Qubes 4 users ellaborate what things I should be doing on Qubes 3 > to get used to not having the Qubes Manager available all the time? > > > > -- > > > > > iuri.neocities.org
Sure, though I might not be able to cover it all, but here are some things to start with. - Qubes 4 uses terminal to create or restore backups, there is as of yet no graphic menu anymore. It might seem frightening at first, but it's not that difficult to use. The most annoying thing is if you want to exclude some Templates or AppVM's, since it'll otherwise restore all your VM's. After you type in your backup password, just put -x "AppVM name" -x "AppVM name" without the exclamation markers. It takes a few minutes of concentration the first time around, but it's not exactly "difficult", just different and takes a bit longer. Type in "qvm-backup-restore -h" for help on commands if needed, or find a Qubes doc guide on the official website. The commandline appears the same in Qubes 3.2 as it is in 4.0-RC2, so you can practice in Qubes 3.2 with a few test AppVM's. - Also, from what I hear, it takes a lot longer to restore backups if you run it through Dom0. Apparently it goes a lot faster if you i.e. make a USB-Qube and restore your backup through an AppVM. I cannot verify if it goes faster since my touch-screen on my laptop is tied to my USB, therefore I cannot create a USB-QUbe. Which meant I had to go for the slow one through Dom0. It took about 10 hours or so for about 60-70 GB of backup data. - Be sure to turn off suspend or hibernate while you run your backup. - Qubes 4-RC2 appears to have some template difficulties, primarily debian and whonix, but also sometimes fedora. The way I solved it was during the install, I allowed the install of Whonix templates. However during the last-step for configuration setup, I removed Whonix in the configuration setup. I also removed the automatic easy "Personal, Work" AppVM setup configuration. I only selected the first line. For whatever reason, if I selected any other configurations below the first, it causes python code errors. Afterwards fedora template works fine, and Whonix is easily fixed with the Qubes official Whonix install guide on the official website. It's basically just to create the sys-whonix and tie the whonix-gw and whonix-ws to the syswhonix for networking. - debian won't run for me, I still haven't found a way to fix it. Instead I just made an extra copy of my Fedora template, and use that template for my packages etc. that I don't want installed in my more secure template/AppVM's. - Qubes 4-RC2 sometimes freezes during install, it'll depend on your hardware. For my case, it only froze once. I restarted and started over, no changes to settings. This time it made it through. Qubes 4-RC1 always froze for me, no matter how many times I tried. The takeaway is, it sometimes helps to restart and try again. - If Qubes 4 succesfully installs, but you get python errors or templates don't appear despite that you installed them, try re-install everything. I believe the late-stage Qubes configuration is what makes the difference. See above step a few steps up. - Find another way to monitor your RAM/CPU use. For example I use "Xl list" in Dom0 to see how much memory Dom0 and all the other Templates/AppVM's are using. The widget shoes Template/AppVM memory use, but it doesn't show you how much memory you got in Dom0. The Dom0 RAM may be nice to know, so you know how much memory you got left for new VM's you plan to start up. - There appears to be a new method to update Templatee VM's. Fedora still works the old way. But Debian and Whonix doesn't. I haven't found any Qubes guides or post about this yet, and haven't had the time to experiment to find out how it works now. But basically, Fedora template updates work. Whonix might also work. I had a lot of trouble with the Debian template system though. Either way, just go with Fedora for now until a guide or post is availale on this matter, or till the error is fixed (if there is any errors and it simply is just a user mistake). - Given the situation, without insider knowledge (aka I simply dont know, this is just a guess), I believe there will be a Qubes 4-RC3 release. All these python errors and template nightmare, and careful picking Qubes configuarion to minimize these issues, seems to be too much to fix with just some updates. However if you can get the Fedora template working, you can just re-install the other templates whenever a fix becomes available. - Qubes 4 appears to come with SALT enabled by default. I haven't ventured too much into this new area much yet, however it seemingly adds a security layer to VM and VM files so that they can't be changed (Possibly? It's still new to me after all, I can't say for sure). Presumably as long it's on the SALT configuration list, you can't change certain things in this VM. Supposedly it's to make Qubes more hack-proof. I haven't yet discovered when this SALT protection applies and when it doesn't. But it can be a real pain if you try to change something, and you don't realize it's the SALT protection preventing you to do it. So it's good to know about it and read up about it. I certainly plan to when I have the time. There is a Qubes developer discussion somewhere on github about it somewhere as well. You should be able to play around with it in Qubes 3.2. before moving to Qubes 4. Apparently its pre-installed in Qubes 3.2, but it's pre-enabled in Qubes 4 for VM's. So Qubes 3.2. has it installed, but not enabled. Something like that. - These are the issues I personally encountered during Qubes 4-RC1 and Qubes 4-RC2, in comparison to Qubes 3.2. I Can't think of more things to watch out for at the moment. I still need more time to mess around with fixes and solutions, reading up and learning, though this is what I gathered for now. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to qubes-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to qubes-users@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/7b9f08d2-5bd8-440d-a8b9-2340a62b63cd%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
