Gentoo issues with (high-)dpi and u2f

User Support General
1

Hello,
I’m running a few Gentoo-based qubes for about half a year now, so first of all thanks a lot foo this great template @fepitre !

However, since a recent emerge world I’m having a few issues and before diving into troubleshooting mode I wanted to check if anyone is seeing this or if it’s specific to my installation:

  • my (high)dpi settings are ignored by Gentoo-based qubes. I have an entry in .Xresources and also a setting in “xfce4-appearance-settings” (not sure which of these was effectively used) with 164 dpi and this was working fine for months. Recently every is displayed with 96dpi again. (non-gentoo qubes still work with their dpi settings)
  • u2f-proxy doesn’t seem to work. I use a Yubikey in several qubes, but in the Gentoo-based qubes it is not working (while everything works in non-Gentoo qubes) - not quite sure if this was ever working in Gentoo though

Anyone else seeing such or similar behavior in general/after recent upgrades?

Thanks,
C

2

Answering my own questions:
The problem was related to gnome-settings-daemon taking precedence over .Xresources.
Unfortunately the available scaling options in gnome-settings-daemon are not good enough, so I simply disabled it and have my .Xresource definition back.
u2f-proxy may have never worked and still isn’t for me.

But unfortunately usb-passthrough (i.e. audio and webcam devices) recently stopped working (after a series of updates). The updates took down X completely, I had to revert qubes-gui-agent to a version < 4.2.0. I’ll try the same with USB proxy to see if it comes back.

@fepitre any comments on the usage of 4.2.0 agent versions? They made their way into the system without my intervention, so I assumed they are safe to use.

3

I’m far from updating R4.2.0 (current master branch on qubes-gentoo overlay) and this is why there is no Gentoo template for now for upcoming R4.2.0. I encourage you to download latest Gentoo template for 4.1 that has been built last month and updated.

4

I am using the 4.1 template but apparently 4.2 agent versions have been merged during emerge world. Maybe the masking is not working as intended, but I don’t think I have manually unmasked anything.

5

Works for me with /etc/portage/repos.conf/qubes.conf:

[qubes]
location = /var/db/repos/qubes
sync-uri = https://github.com/fepitre/qubes-gentoo.git
sync-type = git
sync-git-verify-commit-signature = true
sync-openpgp-key-path = /usr/share/openpgp-keys/9FA64B92F95E706BF28E2CA6484010B5CDC576E2.asc
sync-openpgp-key-refresh = false
auto-sync = yes
sync-git-clone-extra-opts = --branch release4.1

Note the last line. You can also go to /var/db/repos/qubes and use the git commands (status/checkout/pull).

6

right the last line was missing in my template. After adding it the tools were all downgraded to pre-4.2 versions.

Thanks for the hint.

7
8

@fepitre Right I missed that announcement. Nevertheless wouldn’t it make sense to stick in the Gentoo-native way of masking packages (~amd64 or in profiles) rather than depending on the branch that someone is in?

Independent of that, coming back to one of my original questions:
Is u2f supposed to work in the Gentoo template? I could not find qubes-app-u2f in the template, so I guess the answer is no. Is there any reason for not having it or did just nobody implement it yet? (I’d give it a try if the latter is the case).

Edit: Sent a PR: introduce qubes-u2f-proxy for Gentoo by ctr49 · Pull Request #15 · fepitre/qubes-gentoo · GitHub

9

To be honest, I’m not sure what’s the best to handle several Qubes releases in the Gentoo way on the same overlay. I’ve started using branches because this is what we do for other components. My mistake have been to not rebuild Gentoo after branching and to have not noticed Gentoo users in the correct way with a message on pacman. I’ll try to improve this part for the upcoming release.