Hello, I have noticed there is not much if any documentation that can be easily followed by someone that is not experienced digging thru all the depts of linux. I work in videography and I am not a criminal or anything so I was thinking it may be useful to film and post tutorials as I go about learning qubes as I believe the people that need it most will probably be as clueless as I am when it comes to all the complexity of qubes. I believe I am uniquely motivated to go thru the trials and tribulations of this process and I would be proud and happy to help bring this useful OS to people that really need it.
From what I have seen online the reason there are not more tutorials is because the people making tutorials do it for views and profits and there are not many to be had here but I am motivated by freedom and a disgust of censorship and would love nothing more than to help people retain their freedoms. The world is going to hell and if qubes could become more available to regular freedom loving people it may just save the world from a tyrannical hellish future.
So basically I was wondering if anyone would be interested in helping me work thru some issues so that I could make easy to follow tutorials to help regular folks get into qubes. I would assume 99.9% of people would have given up already in my shoes but I am stubborn and autistic and well suited to struggle thru just about any tortures to help my fellow humans avoid tyranny and censorship.
But I am not good at asking for help but if some folks would like to help me out in return for my time working on the tutorials I would be able to cope with that haha. Oh and I just want to spread the freedom to think so any tutorials made would be free for anyone to spread around without any copy writes or anything.
For example I have spent hours trying to figure out how to make my raid 1 data storage drives usable in qubes in a daily driver way and when I am done I should be able to walk other normies thru it in a few minutes. Things like where the drives even need to be attached to be accessible are very complicated and take about one minute to figure out for windows and such. I am asking now because if I get too far into this I will forget all about the initial obstacles and problems I ran into. For example the tutorials I have seen all come from the perspective of a person who already knows all about linux which makes it hard to follow as I spend hours researching jargon and stuff that really just is not useful to accomplish the goal and of no use for people that just want to get qubes to a state where they can do typical stuff with it like use social media and whatnot. I have been using linux for awhile now and had no need to know this stuff, many distros just work like windows but lack security.
I am sorry for the wall of text but if anyone is interested please let me know and together you can help me and together we can answer some of the common questions and give people a video they can link to when other noobs come asking the same questions over and over again.
Also I dont need my hand held thru everything, I mostly would just need to be pointed in the right direction so I dont have to read so much documentation that inevitably has nothing to do with the problem I am trying to solve. Well thanks to anyone that read this and I already have my video and audio equipment set up and plan to start working on the things I have already sorted out in the next day or two. even things like validating that the iso is not hacked by the NSA is a huge nightmare and far more than should be expected from some random whistleblower. Maybe together we can make it so that regular folks can feel like they can speak up without being killed by their governments… Thanks again!
You can create specific topic for every problem you encounter and the Community can try to walk you though the solutions. It should not be necessary to speak personally to achieve what you want.
There is something wrong here. You should be able to use standard Windows tools for writing .iso files to create a bootable USB stick. You should probably create a separate topic for that and the Community can try to help you resolve the issue (and you can create the video after that).
By the way, installation of Qubes from Windows indeed needs a better support, see this: Improve secure installation media preparation process for Windows and Mac users · Issue #6191 · QubesOS/qubes-issues · GitHub.
Where exactly do you get this error? During writing the .iso? Which tool for creating the USB stick did you use? Did you verify the signatures? During the installation? At which stage? As I said above, you should create a separate topic for that and answer there, in order to not clutter this one. Same for your other issues.
It’s not Debian installer but Fedora installer, because dom0 runs Fedora 32.
Oh yea sorry Fedora installer is right. And the “must install linux kernel” error poped up as soon as I would boot from the usb. I was using Belena Etcher. I dont have the problem anymore as I used belena etcher from a kali linux install and it worked right away.
Also I did not bother to validate the qubes iso because I tried for hours and could not find any source for the keys other than the ones on the download page and I was told not to trust those ones. Also I plan to reinstall once I figure out what I am doing with qubes and how to authenticate keys. I spent a few hours working on it but it seemed kind of silly to go thru all the trouble when it would provide me no peace of mind anyway as I do not know how I can authenticate the program that does the validation in the first place. I am more interested in security and privacy and would never have any info on my PC worth stealing or be worried about preventing the NSA access to my pc so I am not really worried about defending myself from the kind of people capable of hijacking the download coming from a security OS’s website. Plus I dont see a point as anyone cappable of doing that surely could just highjack the download of the program I downloaded to do the verification.
If I figure out a way to validate the validator I will reinstall everything and whatnot, plus I have to find outside sources for the keys and I could not stand using windows for another moment.
But thanks for the tips and after reading the quotes of mine you made I apologize for being such a jerk. I guess my frustration came out and being a jerk to people that are working for free is terrible. Again I apologize to anyone that reads that.
Also I agree that it is not necessary to speak personally to solve my issues but From what I hear there is a discord and a telegram for qubes, both of which have voice call options, and if qubes is as good as it sounds I dont think it is a crazy thing to hope for as someone using qubes would hopefully be able to make a secure call. Statistically people retain 10% of the information they read and 50% of information recieved verbally so if someone was willing to have a chat I would be happy to. Plus humans retain 90% of what they teach others so the teacher benafits the most from explaining things.
also seeing as how I would charge a client thousands to tens of thousands of Dollars to make them a video tutorial series I dont think it would be crazy to get a conversation out of the deal. also I dont recall mentioning any specific means of communication, I would be happy to just chat it out here. As you can probably tell I am pretty awful at communicating in the written form, I loath typing and it shows.
Well thanks for your time and sorry for the wall of text.
You have to start your chain of trust somewhere. The higher you start, the harder it will be to break your security.
On Linux, you verify the signature using gpg2 program, which itself was verified by the developers of your distribution. Ideallly, you can try to verify the Linux .iso, which you used for that, too.
You are welcome. I did not find anything particularly insulting in your comments. I’m glad I can be helpful.
Your text would be much more readable if you added empty lines between your different paragraphs.
Thanks and duly noted. I was thinking once I got over to linux I would be able to validate a qubes iso and then reinstall with it. But what exactly is the point in validation? Am I right to assume that it would pretty much only be a government that could pull off man in the middle attacking a torrent and managing to insert code in a way that would still leave the iso in a functioning state to install? I am not too worried about defense from the government as surely they have put a physical backdoor in my motherboard during manufacturing.
My goal with cubes is more security from random hackers and censorship evasion. The most useful thing for me in the Mac address and Ip randomization. I have been severely shadow banned and really just need to be able to post comments online and send emails that will actually be received by the recipient.
This is a problem that is only going to get worse in the near future so I am very interested in making it as easy for people to learn how to use qubes before it becomes illegal to even try to attempt to communicate privately or exercise free speech. I fully anticipate full blown book burning in the streets before too long and I forget who said it but agree that “Anyone that will burn books will soon be burning people.” This was said about the Nazis shortly after their burning of books written by “undesirables” and years before the first gas chambers appeared. Tyranny is on the rise and I would like to put off being placed against the wall and shot for as long as possible and maybe just maybe help prevent things from ever getting that far.
Its just rather hard when you cant even post scientific research papers or quote the law without being censored.
I moved a few posts about “learning retention” because it has no place in the forum and it looked like it was just between two individuals anyways.
Moderator Notice
Please keep the discussion on-point and Qubes-related. If any non-Qubes clarification is needed, feel free to use “private” messages (not e2ee).
I absolutely loathe the term “noob”, or even worse “n00b”, and don’t
think it has a place in our community. As a self description it’s just
about acceptable but it feeds in to a somewhat toxic culture.
Can you make sure that these videos, which sound like an excellent
idea, are for beginners, not noobs?
I never presume to speak for the Qubes team.
When I comment in the Forum or in the mailing lists I speak for myself.
Yes I can do that. I chose noob for my name and topic because expert tend to like when people are self deprecating before asking for free help. But I agree with you and have to say it was probably bad instincts on my part. Acknowledging my shortcomings was some sort of preemptive strike to discourage folks from gate keeping.
This is also a good lesson on the danger of preconceived notions. My experiences of asking people for help online have been largely negative and I brought that here with me only to find out that this is a very civil place and the people appear to be lovely. It is nice to see moderation working to keep this place a positive environment:D
and thanks for the advice. I will be sure to call my tutorial something like beginner and windows->Linux. Thanks for the help and hopefully this comment isnt the kind of thing that should have just been a “like”.
I am new here and still learning the ropes. I am assuming that general discusion has a little more leeway but I guess I should make time to search for the forum rules.
Now that I think about it I already had a discussion in this post split off to private messaging but I will just say this is relevant as it pertains to the title of any tutorials to come out of it. Also anyone else reading may see this and decide to help when maybe they would not have been interested in being credited in the “Noobs guide to Qubes OS” lol.
Well thanks and I appreciate the work you and the other Qubes folks are doing here.