I’m new to forum and relatively new to QUBES. I have built a VM on my laptop of 4.2 and decided that I liked it, when I obtained an e-waste Dell Optiplex 9010 I was going to install it, but was distracted when the guide mentioned you can install it on USB drive for a portable experience. I did this using a VM the first go round, install went great and the machine booted into QUBES every time. I then tried booting into the USB on my laptop and the USB didn’t show up in UEFI, using a linux VM to see the efi partition I noted that the efi folder was completely empty. I did see some “empty efi” forum entries, but none applied to my situation.
I couldn’t get 4.2 to run on my Optiplex so I obtained 4.0.4 and that ran good on the Dell SSD. I did a second install from the PC onto a 128GB USB 3.2 high speed Thumb drive, which loaded fine. I then tried to test it on my computer today and it woudn’t boot. This time around there is a qubes folder in EFI, but a lot of stuff appears to not be working. I was curious if anyone on here was able to sucessfully use a created USB installation on a 2nd PC. It appears that if you stick with the PC you installed it on, everything is fine because a UEFI entry is created in BIOS and you can chose it, but there is no boot64.efi or any .efi files on my efi partition of the USB that I can see. Thanks in advance!
Did you install Qubes OS on USB in Virtual Machine?
In that case maybe the VM was configured to use Legacy BIOS instead of UEFI so there is no EFI System partition present on your USB disk and you can’t boot from in on your laptop without legacy BIOS boot support.
@apparatus I apologize as I did not see your reply until now. I initially used VMware, but I configured the .vmx to have firwmare=“efi”, so it was not using BIOS. I also later used the real machine and installed it. I did note that it had a qubes file in EFI this time, but not what you would need to boot from. I have kind of given up on the idea for now now and put 4.1 on the dell machine to learn more about Qubes. It seems from looking personally, and other forums that the Qubes install creates an EFI in the UEFI of the machine it is installed on, but that does not convey to using it on another machine.
Just out of curiosity, as nothing has been posted here for a while: Does anyone here use QubesOS as an encrypted mobile system from a USB stick? I would find something like this very handy for testing Qubes, but also for travelling. I was able to install QubesOS in a VirtualboxVM on a USB stick without any problems. VM with no hard drive, but installation media clicked, USB stick inserted and done. The stick also boots without problems under UEFI on other laptops and you can log in as your own user. Unfortunately, the QubesOS desktop then closes. Not a single Qube starts… not even sys-usb or sys-net.
I doubt it would be used for anything mission-critical beyond checking to see whether certain hardware behaved as expected when booted with Qubes OS.
If you insist on eating your favourite food off a dirty plate, you’re bound to get food poisoning sooner or later.
(Apologies for the graphic analogy, but it captures perfectly the dangers of what you’re proposing, not to mention some features straight-up not working at all).
Unlike Windows or macOS, Qubes OS does not check to see if it’s running inside a VM, and it doesn’t check to see that it only installs to internal drives. A drive is a drive, after all.
As it should. The same instructions were executed as a standard Qubes OS install.
Either something went wrong during the initial setup, or whatever hardware you’re running that on doesn’t have the appropriate instructions to run Qubes OS properly…
A Live USB of Qubes OS would be good for testing whether certain hardware configurations worked with Qubes OS or not, but I could not see it providing anywhere near the same level of compartmentalisation baseline as when run on trusted hardware.
The Qubes OS Install ISO does contain a few preliminary checks for hardware compatability, too, but there could be a few more, like checking PCI devices for sys-usb suitability, etc.
Thank you for your answer. In the meantime I have found out why I could start QubesOS from the USB stick, but no Qubes (not even the system Qubes) would start: In the VM, the available devices are named differently, e.g. the network adapters. Since sys-USB can no longer find the assigned devices from the installation in the VM on the USB stick, for example, it naturally cannot start. So you first have to reassign all the devices, then the system will run. However, you have to do this again on each new host device. That is annoying. It’s also infinitely slow (it’s just a USB hard disk). Above all, there is no sys-usb because all usb devices are connected to dom0. Not nice. I still find it an exciting experiment, simply because you can, but I’m switching back to a fixed installation. QubesOS without sys-usb is a bit wild.
That would make sense. Looks like it’s at the mercy of the hypervisor it’s running on top of. Hypervisor Inception…
I do too. It’s a very cool “party trick”, but it’s also one of those things that “would be nice”, but “probably isn’t a very good idea” when the alternatives are so much better performing…
Block devices, and that’s it. Not very fun if you need a camera or other USB devices…
I have my live Qubes USB. I use it wherever I want when I want. Everythign works fine.
Doesn’t matter if it’s UEFI or CSM BIOS.
Works perfectly fine anywhere in the world.
Would you like me to make a copy available for people?
Does not have a sys-usb though.
But someone may be able to set one up properly in it?
I have Windows and Linux in there with many tools, but I would remove all that and leave it as a bland installation ready for people to use.
Not hard to do, only takes an installation. I have one that is 32 GB, one that is 16 GB, and one that is 128GB. Also have one that I use in my phone.
Mobile Qubes has a few issues though, but I’m almost able to make it work properly. Along with booting from the mobile phone on the PC.
It’s one thing that I’d love to be able to get finished sometime soon.
Having Qubes on the phone, but then also, with USB, it can boot it on the PC and run as the USB drive.
Taking a while to get the booting system 100% for that though. I have it set up for 32 and 64 bit ARM processors, but it’s the USB integration to load as USB drive and boot that way with the hardware firmware for activating only what is needed to get things going that is causing the most issues.
So hopefully soon you can have the mobile device as the USB drive too.
If you are interestsed, let me know what version of Qubes you want.
I have Qubes 3.2 and 4 that I currently have on USB and working.
But it can start, because the script would be set up to make it work. Not something that would be hard to do. If you can get a USB version set up with a USB Qube I could fix it to make it work on any machine with the sys-usb. in place and completely securing things.
Even with security to make sure things work properly.
I’m not sure if I understood that correctly, my English is not particularly good… you can run a QubesOS VM on a smartphone? Or do you use the smartphone as a data carrier and boot the computer from it? Or both?
I pretty much will be running Qubes on the mobile device.
After that, will be able to, on boot, set it to be a bootable USB drive and it will become as such and allow the PC to boot from it as per a normal USB drive.
But it will also maintain the hardware that it has.
Then also load different profiles based on what it is booting to.