Installation questions about restarting

When I install to the TemplateVM, would this work? I am unsure if I am reading the documentation properly.

  • Use terminal in TemplateVM to install.
  • Shut down the TemplateVM.
  • Start up the TemplateVM. (Or does this have to be after I restart the AppVMs?)
  • If any AppVMs are running which are based on the template, restart them, but if the AppVMs are already shutdown, it seems fine to do nothing with them until a future date? Or must I start each one up?

And is there any way to select multiple AppVMs and restart them all? I have limited RAM at this time so they fail to start if there is not enough memory, and it is tedious if I have many AppVMs.

Software should indeed be installed in TemplateVMs.

Tha last step is wrong. It should read “Start up the AppVM, which relies on that TemplateVM”. Then, the AppVM will have the access to the installed software. TemplateVMs should only be used for installations, AppVMs should only be used to run the software.

Good question. You should be able to write a script in dom0 based on qvm-restart and qvm-ls. More details: Command line utilities — Qubes Admin client v4.2.10-0-gf21e757-dirty documentation.

If you want to have the access to newly installed software, you need to restart the AppVMs, or run them. Otherwise, if you don’t care, you don’t need to touch them at all. They will have the old root system until the reboot.

Thanks.

Would future changes cause problems? For example, a game is installed to the Fedora template, but then 9 of my 10 AppVMs don’t get run for weeks. Then another piece of software is installed before the 9 are run. Is it a problem that they had a second installation (or even a third or fourth) before being run?

No, there should be no problems with that. Each time an AppVM runs, it gets a new root partition from its TemplateVM. See also:

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