Hi, I have a MacBookPro 12,1 (early 2015) and I'm trying to make it work with QubesOS 4.0-rc2. This machine has the internal keyboard and trackpad connected through USB and I've had problems in general GNU/Linux distros (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora) with USB 3.0 xhci_hcd controller where it would not recognize the internal keyboard and I could not type my LUKS passphrase.
First I tried to install QubesOS 4.0-rc2 on a USB stick from the MacBook itself. Apparently the Fedora installer Anaconda recognizes the Apple hardware and prepares the USB stick with some kind of HFS partition. I couldn't boot from the generated USB stick, even with rEFInd installed on the MacBook. What worked was that I installed QubesOS 4.0-rc2 on a USB stick on another computer (running UEFI+Windows) and then I was able to boot that stick on my MacBook from rEFInd. On the first boot, Anaconda asks to set up the VMs. The USB VM option is not enabled because of the internal USB keyboard. If I choose to set up the sys-net VM, the computer would freeze at the step "Setting up networking", on this line https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-installer-qubes-os/blob/master/qubes-anaconda-addon/org_qubes_os_initial_setup/gui/spokes/qubes_os.py#L557 What I did: I just manually edited this file to avoid starting up sys-firewall and sys-net and I was able to boot. I also made sure I disabled the systemd services that start sys-net, sys-firewall and sys-whonix on start-up. Now I can boot Qubes on the MacBook with no VMs started. The next challenge is that I actually want to use internet on this machine. I tried 2 different approaches. 1) Try to make the internal PCI Broadcom BCM43602 work. Whenever sys-net is started with this device attached, the computer would freeze. Also if the device is attached to a running sys-net VM, the computer would freeze. I tried the troubleshooting instructions from https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/macbook-troubleshooting/ but they didn't solve the problem. I enabled PCI passthrough by putting the device into permissive mode. I checked 'dmesg' output and it confirmed that permissive mode was enabled for the device. But the system would still freeze whenever sys-net is run with the device attached. 2) Try to use some USB Wi-Fi I have one GNU/Linux-friendly USB Wi-Fi dongle https://www.thinkpenguin.com/gnu-linux/penguin-wireless-n-usb-adapter-gnu-linux-tpe-n150usb I also have my Android (LineageOS) phone with USB tethering. I tried both those devices to use as USB Wi-Fi adapters. When I run the sys-net VM (without BCM43602 attached) and I use qvm-usb to attach the device to sys-net, I receive an error message about different speed. Is that refering to USB speed of USB 1.1 / USB 2.0 / USB 3.0? On this MacBook, both USB ports are capable of USB 3.0. There is only one USB PCI device, but there are 2 buses: one bus for USB 2.0 devices and one bus for USB 3.0 devices. The Wi-Fi adapters and the internal keyboard/trackpad all fall in USB 2.0 bus. I was able to attach a USB mass storage device to the VMs and use it inside the VMs, but no luck with the USB Wi-Fi. Is it even possible to use a USB Wi-Fi adapter with Qubes without having a dedicated USB VM? How can it be done? Maybe the only solution to get Wi-Fi on this machine is to use the USB Wi-Fi adapter directly in dom0. I know it's bad for security, but are there instructions on how to make this work? Any other thoughts? Thank you, ed25519. -- 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/3af69ad6-e8bf-ffa7-0dfc-e8e86f830c30%40riseup.net. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
