I’ve read a lot of posts that get close to this topic, but none that have a clear answer, especially one that is up-to-date. I have also seen some people suggest that questions like this are why dumb folks like me should just use the full templates rather than minimal. God forbid anyone should try to learn something new, or to experiment, right? The whole point of this little experiment is that I am used to headless systems, and want to learn about Network Manager and Qubes networking, and I thought this might be one little thing to try. Anyway…
I’m trying to use fedora-43-minimal as a template for sys-net. (Really a modified version of fedora-43-minimal which I’ll call fedora43-NET.)
on fedora43-NET I’ve installed:
linux-firmware (iwlwifi is my Debian driver for my wifi card)
gnome-keyring
wpa_supplicant
qubes-core-agent-networking
qubes-core-agent-network-manager
network-manager-applet
iproute
notification-daemon
NetworkManager-wifi
qubes-core-agent-dom0-updates
The sys-net qube is the same one that works to provide network when I set the template to a modified debian-13NET (based on debian-13-minimal after adding some packages, as described above with Fedora), or with Fedora 43 full. So there is no problem with the sys-net configuration by itself, or with the computer hardware.
The problem is that I still do not see wifi connections available in the NM applet in the top-right of my Qubes desktop. Can anyone tell me what I am missing in terms of packages or configuration?
A related question is: how can I tell how much RAM I am saving, by using the minimal template vs full? I want to do this experiment either way, but I don’t know if I’ll keep both templates around if there’s no real benefit in terms of RAM usage.
It should be clear that it’s not about “dumb people” or preventing experiments. To me, it’s about one’s ability to do personal research while experimenting and the time we spend as a community on this topic.
In that case, I believe that all your questions have already been answered on the forum, although, I too, have not searched for it.
Have you tried looking into lspci like it is suggested by docs?
free reports current memory situation on a running machine. In general I wouldn’t expect much savings especially considering that sys-net is probably hvm and thus won’t participate in memory balancing. IMO minimal templates are better for saving disk space, not memory.
What do you mean? I though you were trying to measure memory use inside sys-net, not in dom0. Yes, measuring memory consumption of dom0 won’t give you what you want
I am trying to measure how much overall system RAM I save using a minimal template vs full. Free space within sys-net isn’t interesting, unless it is directly effective of this.
Since sys-net is an hvm and doesn’t participate in memory balancing, it will always use the same amount of memory from the perspective of your hypervisor. By measuring how much memory it consumes internally you can tell whether it actually needs all the memory you allocate to it or you can cut it down a bit. (And I bet that this won’t give you much if anything at all)