Custom Disposable VM not loading as disposable

I went through this guide: Disposable customization | Qubes OS

I’m using a template I cloned, and performed configurations in. Then went into Dom 0 following the commands in the guide. The new supposed disp-vm is created, but when I go to open the app, it’s static. When I close it, it’s just stays open. Acts as if it’s not disable but just an appvm of the template.

I opened up settings on qube manager and the box is ticked that it’s a disposible vm. Not sure why it’s not acting like one.

Am I missing something here? I expected to be able to open something like calc, and for [disp1400] calc to open. But it doesn’t.

Log out & log back in. Then it should start as Disposable.

Hi @anon93834559,

I think you are starting the AppVM that acts as a template for disposable VMs. The way it works is this:

Template: e.g. fedora-32
AppVM aka “Template for Disposable”: e.g. my-dvm (based on fedora-32)
and then the actual disposable based on e.g. my-dvm

First make sure you have set the template_for_dispvms property on my-dvm to true. That makes it a template for a disposable VM. However if you just start it using qvm-start, the Qube Manager or at this point even the XFCE menu you will still get the AppVM (so you can customize it).

You still need to set qvm-features my-dvm appmenus-dispvm 1. Once you did that the XFCE menu will actually launch a dispVM instance instead of the underlying AppVM. It is possible that you need to logout and back in for that to take effect as @ComprehensiveAddict points out.

However, qvm-start and Qube Manager will still start the AppVM and not a dispVM when you use them. To launch a dispVM from the command line you need:

qvm-run --dispvm=my-dvm --service qubes.StartApp+xterm

See here for more details.

It took me about 30 minutes to figure out why my dvm is broken after switching to fedora-34.
Why is it broken in the first place?
Maybe we could append this note in the documentation @ Templates | Qubes OS to Switching#4
I guess other people will be happy too about this info