Abortive Qubes Install: Missing Templates

User Support General
1

Hi.

tl;dr

The Qubes installer completes, apparently successfully :slight_smile: But when I reboot, it’s clear that it’s missing important components: namely, the qube OS templates (for Debian, Whonix etc). Any help gratefully received. Thank you :slight_smile:

more

I tried Qubes a few years ago, and I liked it a lot - it’s a brilliant project :+1: I was able to install it fine, and I used it for a few months. But the laptop I was using at the time didn’t support VT-d (I/O MMU virtualisation) which I understand is sub-optimal in security terms.

My current laptop has a much better spec, and - importantly - supports both VT-x with EPT, and VT-d (…both of which are enabled in the BIOS, which I updated to the latest version).

The problem is that I can’t install Qubes on it :frowning: The installer boots OK, and I can:

  • change l10n
  • configure storage
  • create a user account successfully

But the “software” page in Anaconda has no options for OS templates (Debian, Whonix etc.): the only option in the RH pane is dom0 with xfce (?)

I’m fairly confident the issue isn’t the USB sticks: I’ve tried two different sticks (one 8GB, one 16GB), I tested them both before use with badblocks and f3, and dd’ed the Qubes .isos to them in the recommended way. I carefully validated the .isos after downloading them, and I (re)validated the installers after creation (kudos to whoever wrote the documentation, BTW: I think it’s excellent :+1: )

Other things I’ve tried:

  • downloading the previous version of Qubes (4.1.2 instead of 4.2.1) (same result)
  • going to a tty while the installer is running, to check what’s going on (see below)

I read this, which sounds like the same thing. But the suggested solution doesn’t work for me: there is no /mnt/sysimage (presumably because the installer mounts stuff elsewhere now).

If I run find / -name '*.repo' I can see:

/etc/anaconda.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo
/etc/anaconda.repos.d/fedora.repo
/etc/anaconda.repos.d/qubes-templates.repo
/etc/anaconda.repos.d/qubes-dom0.repo

…and I’m assuming they’re what I need. But they’re (apparently) not recognised by the installer(?)

Does anyone have any advice, please?

TIA and best regards

2

The templates are installed at Initial Setup stage at first boot after the installation completes and not in Anaconda:

3

Hi @apparatus, and thanks for responding so quickly :slight_smile:

The templates are installed at Initial Setup stage at first boot after the installation completes and not in Anaconda

Ah: “user error” on my part :blush:

(Embarrassingly, I did RTFM…but clearly not well enough).

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction :+1: