Installation problem. No Software/No Templates/No Default System Qubes

Query · December 10, 2023, 12:26am

Hi Everyone! I’m new in Qubes and Tech in general I may did some mistakes while trying to fix my problem, so I need step-by-step instructions what to do in my situation.
Please help me find out solution, I tried too many weeks by my own and it doesn’t work as you can see.

I tried both releases Qubes-R4.1.2-x86_64.iso and Qubes-R4.2.0-rc5-x86_64.iso, since Qubes-R4.2.0 go for RC5 testing-release I will stick to that and use only this version.

In Installation Setup I have only Qubes OS/dom0 software WITHOUT any Fedora/Debian or Whonix options
Also I could not tick on any
Create default system qubes (sys-net, sys-Firewall, default DispVM)
Create default application qubes (personal, work, untrusted, etc)
Create Whonix Gateway and Workstation qubes (sys-whonix, anon-whonix)
etc
Basically I have bold version of OS without anything important, how can I solve a problem?

I see Fedora/Debian/Whonix noarch.rpm packages in my ISO media, maybe someone could help how to install them before installation process in (Grub/Kernel or Anaconda) or after installation process thru dom0 or somehow with step-by-step instructions? Pleease

Also, I tried this too many times, but it seems doesn’t work for me, I was using Nano text editor and Issue was that I couldn’t see the directory path or no permission to edit it, I don’t remember exactly, may someone please help me how to go about that, step by step:
To boot the installer, you need to remove mapbs=1 and noexitboot=1 To get suspend to work, you need to add mem_sleep_default=deep to the kernel= line in /boot/efi/EFI/qubes/xen.cfg.

PS I have 64GB of RAM if this matter
APPRECIATE your time and kindness, Thank you all for at least read my post.
Have a Good day

Minio · December 10, 2023, 1:06am

Also I could not tick on any

I think this is the result of not installing either Fedora or Debian as the default VMs need a template to be based on.

You will have to take quite a bit of time to dig into the system to get this running on your own in my opinion. The documentation lacks some parts and is not really as helpful here in my personal opinion. Other parts appear to be outdated. I may have missed something though. The initial setup you are describing is a tool you can find on the OS and on GitHub. I did a dive into that for my installation issues. I will add a post related to that in my thread in a moment: Installer corrupts installation medium (+ bounty for help)

Update: Helping hand for setting up the default system without the initial setup GUI: Installer corrupts installation medium (+ bounty for help) - #19 by Minio

nealr · December 10, 2023, 2:48am

I encountered something like this yesterday. The manner in which I got to it was this:

messed around with 4.2.0rc5 on a 250GB SSD using LVM.
reinstalled switching to using BTRFS.
install did NOT free up the whole drive.
Got an unstable system with no templates.

64GB is plenty, tell us about your storage. What does the partition table look like? Using LVM? what does it report about available space?

Query · December 11, 2023, 8:19pm

Hi Everyone! I’m new in Qubes and Tech in general I may did some mistakes while trying to fix my problem, so I need step-by-step instructions what to do in my situation.
Please help me find out solution, I tried too many weeks by my own and it doesn’t work as you can see.

I tried both releases Qubes-R4.1.2-x86_64.iso and Qubes-R4.2.0-rc5-x86_64.iso, since Qubes-R4.2.0 go for RC5 testing-release I will stick to that and use only this version.

In Installation Setup I have only Qubes OS/dom0 software WITHOUT any Fedora/Debian or Whonix options
Also I could not tick on any
Create default system qubes (sys-net, sys-Firewall, default DispVM)
Create default application qubes (personal, work, untrusted, etc)
Create Whonix Gateway and Workstation qubes (sys-whonix, anon-whonix)
etc
Basically I have bold version of OS without anything important, how can I solve a problem?

I see Fedora/Debian/Whonix noarch.rpm packages in my ISO media, maybe someone could help how to install them before installation process in (Grub/Kernel or Anaconda) or after installation process thru dom0 or somehow with step-by-step instructions? Pleease

Also, I tried this too many times, but it seems doesn’t work for me, I was using Nano text editor and Issue was that I couldn’t see the directory path or no permission to edit it, I don’t remember exactly, may someone please help me how to go about that, step by step:
To boot the installer, you need to remove mapbs=1 and noexitboot=1 To get suspend to work, you need to add mem_sleep_default=deep to the kernel= line in /boot/efi/EFI/qubes/xen.cfg.

PS I have 64GB of RAM if this matter
APPRECIATE your time and kindness, Thank you all for at least read my post.
Have a Good day

nealr · December 11, 2023, 9:48pm

Be more specific about your hardware - the make and model of the machine would be helpful.

I encountered something like this myself, it came in the context of me doing much testing, and what I think happened is that the installer is imperfect when deleting/recovering disk space. The instance I had that did what you are describing had a 240GB drive, but it chose to just make three 20GB partitions, and the lack of templates was due to the lack of contiguous drive space for them.

dispuser · December 12, 2023, 12:15am

did you verify the hash file of the download or check the signature to make sure it was a good iso? Or did you just download a torrent and figured it’s probably fine and not infected?

Did you burn the iso to a USB multiple times to make sure there was no error in the process of burning the iso to usb?

Do you have a Qubes compatible system? Just because you can run Windows doesn’t mean you can run Qubes. Qubes is notoriously unable to be loaded on many PCs. Did you check the list of Qubes compatible systems?

Did you look at your bios settings to enable the many things that are needed or see if they are there? Do you know what is enabled in your bios?

Did you try to continue without checking on options? I don’t remember the install much but there’s two parts, there’s the installing from the USB and then Qubes does another setup on first boot.

I don’t know what you are doing wrong and there are many people in this forum smarter than I am by a large amount but answering those questions is more likely to help them help you.

Minio · December 12, 2023, 1:58am

You created the same post two days ago and I sent you a link to a lengthy response of mine detailing a manual setup of Qubes initial state: Installation problem. No Software/No Templates/No Default System Qubes

Have you read it at all?

gonzalo-bulnes · December 12, 2023, 10:43am

Moderation note

I merged both topics, which resulted in some duplication (from the nearly identical posts) and some interleaving (the posts are sorted chronologically).

@Query Keeping all replies to a given questions in the same thread makes them more useful for everyone. Please avoid creating duplicate posts in the future.

dispuser · December 12, 2023, 7:40pm

This may be a problem that can be overcome by changing bios settings. We have no idea what you are doing. We need much more information.

Query · December 12, 2023, 9:12pm

To all questions what you ask me, I would say YES, except I didn’t verify ISO, but it is from main Qubes source/w-site I just simply avoid wasting time on that, because I knew I had this installation problem now, so I less think about that ISO was compromised, more likely ISO file have problem a bit with my system.

But, I actually find a solution, I hope so, just don’t know how to use it right.

github.com

QubesOS/qubes-anaconda-addon/blob/main/org_qubes_os_initial_setup/service/qubes.py

#
# The Qubes OS Project, https://www.qubes-os.org/
#
# Copyright (C) 2019 Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
#                           <marmarek@invisiblethingslab.com>
#
# This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public
# License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
# version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
#
# This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
# Lesser General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public
# License along with this library; if not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
import logging

This file has been truncated. show original

github.com

QubesOS/qubes-anaconda-addon/blob/main/org_qubes_os_initial_setup/gui/init.py

"""
We need org_qubes_os_initial_setup/gui to be a package so that relative imports
work.

"""

import gi

gi.require_version("Gtk", "3.0")
gi.require_version("Gdk", "3.0")
gi.require_version("GLib", "2.0")

from gi.repository import Gtk
from gi.repository import Gdk
from gi.repository import GLib

import logging
import threading

This file has been truncated. show original

How should I go about that? Where should I put this code? In my beliefs in Anaconda terminal or whatever it’s called, I only knew that anaconda “terminal” pop up only before installation start, and there is no way to put all this code manually from 19-259… but whatever, I need an answer where exactly and how to import all this code?

Also maybe I need to use all of this code to apply all settings there? (PS: I don’t know how to use fork)

Thanks everyone for responses, Hope that I will find somebody who will help to navigate me right or show the right way. Appreciate all of you.

Query · December 12, 2023, 9:23pm

I’m trying too. It’s just sad to see that post didn’t get views and answers. Compare to other posts.
Also, why some posts get that much views over 1k just for less then 30 minutes and other ones didn’t get a 100 views. I ask that kind of weird question, because I understand how many people are struggling with that, with first steps.
Peace

Query · December 12, 2023, 9:32pm

I hope you will check my answer to mr./ms. dispuser, mr./ms. Minio.

Minio · December 12, 2023, 10:17pm

You don’t want to put the code anywhere.
This is the code for the initial setup GUI. You can go through it to see what the installer you weren’t able to use does and find the system commands being executed in dom0. You want to execute the proper commands in a dom0 terminal.

self.run_command in the code runs a command in dom0. All parameters of that function are just things you want to craft a command with. Each entry needs to be separated by a comma.
For example, if you see self.run_command(["qubesctl", "--all", "state.highstate"]) in the code, you would want to execute qubesctl --all state.highstate in dom0.

Read my post again, work through the code and extract the proper commands that apply to your desired Qubes configuration.
You can start here: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-anaconda-addon/blob/main/org_qubes_os_initial_setup/service/qubes.py#L200
If you see a task being appended to tasks (and the condition in front of it, if any, fits your desired configuration), lookup the task in the other file I linked you to see what steps you need to take in a dom0 terminal. Do this until you reach the end of the install_with_tasks function.
As an example, if you see if self.disp_firewallvm_and_usbvm in the code, you would want to decide if you want sys-firewall and sys-usb to be disposable or not. Run the command prefixed with this condition if so, otherwise don’t.

Query · December 13, 2023, 3:31am

1.Should I put this code after unsuccessful (bold-empty) installation?
2.Software and templates will invokes/get installed after I put this code at installed media, existing Qubes OS (bold) at USB 3.0 media ?

gonzalo-bulnes · December 13, 2023, 10:40pm

Side-note regarding the ask of not creating duplicate topics:

I understand it can be frustrating to see other topics get more attention than the ones you care about.

There are many reasons why some titles or posts may attract conversation more than others, for example:

answers come from people volunteering their time, according to their own interests
the forum is primarly an English-language space
some answers to common questions are already available in the forum

Some of those reasons can be considered limitations of the forum, and that may be disappointing. However, creating duplicate topics is unlikely to mitigate any of those limitations, and makes some of them worse by making solutions more difficult to find.

dispuser · December 14, 2023, 8:26am

You should verify the ISO you downloaded from the website and if you no longer have the ISO and installed Qubes, you should format your system, hope that the ISO didn’t contain firmware level malware, and never do something like that again.

Not checking the hash value of the OS defeats the entire purpose of Qubes. It doesn’t matter if you got it from the website.

The website you were on could have been a fake website modified to send you a Qubes iso that is bad. Not checking a ISO installation is the worst thing you can do unless you are already running Qubes and are running it compartmentalized and deny it network access and even then it’s bad.

You didn’t answer any of my questions. I don’t know your bios settings. I don’t really know if you tried multiple USB or multiple USB burns. I don’t know if you checked the hardware list or what hardware you have. Go back to my post and answer the questions if you want help.

100 views is plenty of views. Of the people who read your post, probably over 50 percent were expert developers who could have helped but there was not sufficient information.

Go back, reread the post, answer the questions.

ChrisA · December 14, 2023, 1:39pm

It’s unclear to me, if you did/got the “INITIAL SETUP” (with “FINISH CONFIGURATION”) or the install process for some reason failed to start that.

If you didn’t get the “INITIAL SETUP”, can (or did?) you try (from dom0):

sudo /usr/libexec/initial-setup/initial-setup-graphical

?

Query · December 14, 2023, 6:26pm

Yes I been going thru all Initial Setup, but there is no software to choose (Fedora/Debian/Whonix) at the beginning installation process and by ending installation process I could not tick on any (Sys-net, sys-firewall, sys-usb or any of that options)

I did not try at dom0, I just format my usb when I saw that system are really bold and now wanna did everything right before I install OS at my usb.

What would happened if change existing codes (gedit files) at USB ISO media?
Does this settings will automatically apply?
I wanna try that, I read codes from Marmarek developer and wanna implement them to my ISO files.
My, existing ISO codes are fucked up, they missed a lot of codes (compare to Marmarek codes which I show in this thread) I completely understand that I need modify codes for a system can properly work.
Please may someone answer to this question?

apparatus · December 14, 2023, 6:37pm

Did you install Qubes OS on USB drive?
What was the drive size?
Did you use the entry drive for Qubes OS installation or just some part of it?

Query · December 14, 2023, 6:46pm

1 yes
2 256 gb
3 I use entire drive, OS make automatically partitions. And also I tried to give 40-60gb for installation process/partition as well. Both options had same results.